Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth

Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Far away beyond the pine-woods,' he answered, in a low dreamy voice, 'there is a little garden. There the grass grows long and deep, there are the great white stars of the hemlock flower, there the nightingale sings all night long. All night long he sings, and the cold, crystal moon looks down, and the yew-tree spreads out its giant arms over the sleepers.

Harry, said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. World's had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow...

It is very wrong to kill any one[.] Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

What is done is done. What is past is past. You call yesterday the past? What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar

Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is

Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.

He is fond of being misunderstood. It gives him a post of vantage.

I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.

The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world's sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.

Everyone quoted it, it was full of so many words that they could not understand.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols of things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

Oh, I don't care about Jack. I don't care for anybody in the whole world but you. I love you, Cecily. You will marry me, won't you? You silly boy! Of course. Why, we have been engaged for the last three months. For the last three months?

I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.