Oscar Wilde

To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.

When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

The curves of your lips rewrite history.

To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist - the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar.

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

It is personalities not principles that move the age.

A method of procuring sensations? Do you think then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again? Don't tell me that.\' says Dorian. \'Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often,\' says Lord Henry

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden.\' \'But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!\' \'I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing.\' \'That may be, but the muffins are the same!

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.

There was purification in punishment. Not 'Forgive us our sins,' but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of a man to a most just God.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

Prism! Where is that baby?

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.

The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.

I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.

Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither

Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.