Quotes from Oscar Wilde

I don't know that women are always rewarded for being charming. I think they are usually punished for it!

It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand.

It's most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when they are alone. The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life.

My dear boy... anybody can be good in the country.

Algernon: You can't possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It's absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that...

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Criminal Minds, Believer: "A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."

Now and then it is a joy to have one's table red with wine and roses...

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.

Too much work, and no vacation, Deserves at least a small libation. So hail! my friends, and raise your glasses, Work's the curse of the drinking classes.

Put your talent into your work, but your genius into your life.

When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.

Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.

But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.