Quotes from Oscar Wilde

I wrote when I did not know life; now that I know life, I have no more to say.

Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.

I love you, I love you, my heart is a rose which your love has brought to bloom, my life is a desert fanned by the delicious breeze of your breath, and whose cool spring are your eyes; the imprint of your little feet makes valleys of shade for me, the odour of your hair is like myrrh, and wherever you go you exhale the perfumes of the cassia tree. Love me always, love me always. You have been the supreme, the perfect love of my life; there can be no other...

The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

I never saw sad men who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue We prisoners called the sky, And at every happy cloud that passed In such strange freedom by.

The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability.

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

I talk so trivially about life because I think that life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.  It has led Individualism entirely astray.  It has made gain not growth its aim.  So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.  The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.

The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.

In fact, now you mention the subject, I have been very bad in my own small way. I don't think you should be so proud of that, though I am sure it must have been very pleasant.

Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are.

while to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such I think I have become.

One should never give a woman anything she can't wear in the evening.

Before Turner there was no fog in London.

Silently we went round and round, And through each hollow mind The memory of dreadful things Rushed like a dreadful wind, And horror stalked before each man, And terror crept behind.

But strange that I was not told That the brain can hold In a tiny ivory cell God's heaven and hell.

What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both.

Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood

between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if as much as one

I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love.