Oscar Wilde

A kiss may ruin a human life

With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame

I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns.

Art only begins where Imitation ends.

Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.

The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heartЂ'hearts are made to be brokenЂ'but that it turns one's heart to stone.

What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.

The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.

When you really want love you will find it waiting for you.

sorrow...is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it

You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all.

And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine Burned like the ruby fire set In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine, Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate, Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine.

Duty is what one expects from others.

Reported as Oscar Wilde's last words on his death bed... This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go.

Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.

What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true.

Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life

I am always late on principle, my principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.

It is so easy to convince others; it is so difficult to convince oneself.

Civilization is not by means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.

If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.

The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.

The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us.

My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly! You didn't know it then-you know it now.

I like talking to a brick wall- it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!