Quotes from Oscar Wilde

You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet—we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke's—we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces.

Ah, Robbie, when we are dead and buried in our porphyry tombs, and the trumpet of the Last Judgement is sounded, I shall turn and whisper to you, 'Robbie, Robbie, let us pretend we do not hear it.

Suddenly I found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me.

It is awfully hard work doing nothing.  However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind.

A veces podemos pasarnos años sin vivir en absoluto, y de pronto toda nuestra vida se concentra en un solo instante.

Lady Bracknell.  Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon.  I'm feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell.  That's not quite the same thing.  In fact the two things rarely go together. 

Nos prometieron que los sueños podrían volverse realidad. Pero se les olvido mencionar que las pesadillas también son sueños.

Then I must learn how to be happy.  Once I knew it, or thought I knew it, by instinct.  It was always springtime once in my heart.  My temperament was akin to joy.  I filled my life to the very brim with pleasure, as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine.  Now I am approaching life from a completely new standpoint, and even to conceive happiness is often extremely difficult for me.

The art of living. The only really Fine Art we have produced in modern times.

Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones. 

There was a silence. The evening darkened in the room. Noiselessly and with silver feet the shadows crept in from the garden. The colours faded wearily out of things.

I get hungry for her presence; and when I think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, I am filled with awe.

I like men who have a future and women who have a past

To be good is to be in harmony with oneself, He replied, touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One's own life-that is the important thing. As for the lives of ones's neighbors, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern.

I am always saying what I shouldn't say; in fact, I usually say what I really think--a great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.

iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox.

I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature Hell.

Like all good reputations... every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.

I think after Christmas would be better for publication: I am hardly a Christmas present.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.

El cigarro es un ejemplo perfecto de un placer perfecto. Es exquisito y deja a uno insatisfecho

Life is never fair, Robert. And perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it.

La risa es la actitud primitiva hacia la vida, una forma de acercamiento que sólo sobrevive en artistas y criminales.