Oscar Wilde

“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.”

“I have nothing to declare except my genius.”

“How pale the Princess is! Never have I seen her so pale. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver.”

“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.”

“The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”

“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.”

“Punctuality is the thief of time”

“The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.”

“Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is.”

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.”

“When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.”

“The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.”

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

“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.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.”

“The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.”

“There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.”

“If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.”

“Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”

“I drink to separate my body from my soul.”

“The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.”