Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

sorrow...is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it

Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing. You lost life's secret.

Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil, cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.

We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.

He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.

How clever are you, my dear! You never mean a single word you say!

Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.

The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less.

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

Even things that are true can be proved.

You are Beautiful when you are happy

My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.

Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They're the only things we can pay.