Oscar Wilde

Some things are more precious because they don't last long.

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

The only thing in the world worse than being Oscar Wilde is not being Oscar Wilde.

There is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty.

We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with those virtues that are likely to benefit ourselves. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.

Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree.

Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.

London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognize them. They look so thoroughly unhappy.

The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.

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. To the great poet, there is only one method of music - his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting - that which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and all modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal

Bunbury? Oh, he was quite exploded. Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity. My dear Aunt Augusta, I mean he was found out! The doctors found out that Bunbury could not , that is what I meanЂ'so Bunbury died. He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians.

It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.

She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses but in all my garden there is no red rose.

Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

Do you smoke? Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. I'm glad to hear of it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.

A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.

She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

Even things that are true can be proved.

Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar

He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait)