Quotes from Oscar Wilde

A flower blossoms for its own joy.

Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy.

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.

To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.

Everything that is popular is wrong.

Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile.

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand, For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee

History is a lie commonly agreed upon.

Give children beauty, not the record of bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls, as they call history, or of the latitude and longitude of places nobody cares to visit, as they call geography.

History is merely gossip

Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.

Niagara Falls is simply a vast unnecessary amount of water going over the wrong way and then falling over unnecessary cliffs...The wonder would be if the water did not fall.

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

Something was dead in each of us, and what was dead was hope

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

"I hope to-morrow will be a fine day, Lane." "It never is, sir." "Lane, you're a perfect pessimist." "I do my best to give satisfaction, sir."

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

And all, but Lust, is turned to dust In Humanity's machine.

Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.

I quite agree with Dr. Nordau's assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.

I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.