Quotes from Oscar Wilde

What of Art? -It is a malady. --Love? -An Illusion. --Religion? -The fashionable substitute for Belief. --You are a sceptic. -Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith. --What are you? -To define is to limit.

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

Some things are more precious because they don't last long.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard Some do it with a bitter look Some with a flattering word The coward does it with a kiss The brave man with a sword

The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.

To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

Every woman is a rebel.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being