Oscar Wilde

The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.

The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pГЁres ont toujours tort.

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.

Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.

Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important.

Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.

Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman

The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.

They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance

Dear little Swallow,' said the Prince, 'you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery.

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

Every woman becomes their mother. That's their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That's his tragedy.

The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical.

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.

I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope.

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

Lord AUGUSTUS:(looking around) Time to educate yourself, I suppose. DUMBY: No, time to forget all I have learned. That is much more important.

A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacrifice to me, a useless sacrifice.

If people are dishonest once, they will be dishonest a second time. And honest people should keep away from them. (Lady Chiltern)

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.

You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid

because to influence a person is to give one's own soul.

It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.

It is always painful fo part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.

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

What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence.

Oh, no doubt the cod is a splendid swimmer - admirable for swimming purposes but not for eating.

A publisher is simply a useful middle-man.