Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the priviledge of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor shall be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

He is all my art to me now.

Caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius.

The final mystery is oneself.

No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself

In America, the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefit of their inexperience.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry.

To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.

He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression...

Miss Prism: ... And you do not seem to reealize, dear Doctor, that by persistently remaining single, a man coverts himself into a permanent public temptation. ... Chausuble: But is a man not equally attractive when married? Miss Prism: No married man is ever attractive except to his wife. Chausuble: And often, I´ve been told, not even to her.

I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice.

I am afraid that she is a coquette, for she is always flirting with the wind.

For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all.  Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.  That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view.  They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins.  They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat. 

Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off... p 207

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets make a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

Lord Henry had not yet come in. He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.

I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought:

What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.

MRS ALLONBY Have you tried a good reputation? LORD ILLINGWORTH It is one of the many annoyances to which I have never been subjected.