Oscar Wilde

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others wr

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

Niagara Falls is simply a vast unnecessary amount of water going over the wrong way and then falling over unnecessary cliffs...The wonder would be if the water did not fall.

Disobedience is man's original virtue.

Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.

The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it.

People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies.

One should absorb the color of life.

Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world's tongue.

Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex, multiform creature that bears within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh is tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat.

He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.

Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all.

I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

Do not forget that small daily actions do or undo character.

There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured.

Men of thoughts should have nothing to do with action.

Starvation, not sin, is the parent of modern crime.

In a temple everything should be serious except the thing that is being worshiped.

Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.

Chrysanthemums from gilded argosy<br />Unload their gaudy senseless merchandise.

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.

The only real people are the people who never existed.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

Always! That is the dreadful word ... it is a meaningless word, too.

To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.

I can't stand people that do not take food seriously.

The job of the critic is to report to us his moods.

I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.