Quotes from Oscar Wilde

A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.

I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.

If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart

anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often

Vivere è la cosa più rara nel mondo. Molta gente esiste: ecco tutto.

Do you think that I would not have let you know that, if you suffered, I was suffering too: that if you wept there were tears in my eyes also: and that if you lay in the house of bondage and were despised of men, I out of my griefs had built a house in which to dwell until your coming, a treasury in which all that man had denied to you would be laid up for your healing, one hundredfold in increase?

Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failures.

I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.

Some love too little, some too long, Some sell, and others buy; Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die. He

She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.

It is always worth while asking a question, though it is not always worth while answering one.

The one advantage of playing with fire, Lady Caroline, is that one never gets even singed. It is the people who don't know how to play with it who get burned up.

To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.

The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang TsÇ" spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things.

Your vanity is ridiculous, your conduct an outrage, and your presence in my garden utterly absurd

but love is not fashionable anymore, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once-but no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.

Even if I had not been waiting but had shut the doors against you, you should have remembered that no one can possibly shut the doors against love forever.

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously.  If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't.  Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.

I have been right, Basil, haven't I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare's plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame…

Para la mayoría de nosotros la verdadera vida es la vida que no llevamos.