Oscar Wilde

Industry is the root of all ugliness.

Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won't expect it back.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.

It is only the sacred things that are worth touching

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.

With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.

The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.\' \'Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.\' \'I say it's perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.

Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate.

I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it.

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.

I love the French language... it's a delightful language, especially to curse with. It's like whopping your ass with silk.

Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.

Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant.

I'm not nearly young enough to know everything

My wish isn't to mean<br /> everything to everyone<br /> but something to someone.

It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.

The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.

A process which makes one rogue cleverer than another.

To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

I'm too old to know everything

we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others

The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married.

To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all!

He wants to enslave you.' 'I shudder at the thought of being free.