Oscar Wilde
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.Collection: Love
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.Collection: Dreams
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.Collection: Learning
The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.Collection: Marriage
The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.Collection: Technology
Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.Collection: Science
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.Collection: Family
Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.
In married life three is company and two none.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
Those whom the gods love grow young.
Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
Charity creates a multitude of sins.
Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
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.
Why was I born with such contemporaries?
Alas, I am dying beyond my means.
Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.
The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
I have nothing to declare except my genius.
The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.
Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
Only the shallow know themselves.
Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.
In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.
Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat.
Writing bores me so.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.
When good Americans die they go to Paris.
There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.
In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.