Oscar Wilde

Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.

In war,\' answered the weaver, \'the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call u

Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.

For one moment our lives met, our souls touched.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.

I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.

He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.

I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me

I am sorry my life is so marred and maimed by extravagance. But I cannot live otherwise. I, at any rate, pay the penalty of suffering.

My friend is not allowed to go out today. I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life. They fill him with surprise. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine.

Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.

How clever are you, my dear! You never mean a single word you say!

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.

When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.

Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.

Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?

But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

You and I will always be friends.\' \'Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that.