Oscar Wilde

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.

Ah, on what little things does happiness depend.

It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting

I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.

People are either charming or tedious.

Where your life leads you, you must go

And once, or twice, to throw the dice is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin in the secret house of shame

Let me be surrounded by luxury, I can do without the necessities!

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.

To be good is to be in harmony with one's self.

Ah! happy day they whose hearts can break<br />And peace of pardon win!<br />How else may man make straight his plan<br />And cleanse his soul from Sin?<br />How else but through a broken heart<br />May Lord Christ enter in?

My Salome is a mystic the sister of SalammbГґ a Saint ThГ©rГЁse who worships the moon.

The trouble with women is, that when they grow up, they turn into their mothers. The trouble with men is, that they don't.

There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

As I lounged in the Park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at everyone who passed me, and wonder, with mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror.

It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.

Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

Tea is the only simple pleasure left to us.

You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

Credit is a young man's capital.

Each of us has heaven and hell in him...

To look at a thing is very different from seeing it.

Dammit Sir, it's your duty to get married. You can't always be living for pleasure!