Oscar Wilde

How long could you love a woman who didn't love you, Cecil? A woman who didn't love me? Oh, all my life!

He made me see what Life is, and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than both.

A mask tells us more than a face.

A flower blossoms for its own joy.

My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter warders sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. I have had moments when I thought it would be wise to separate. Ah! Moments of weakness and madness! Now I see that would have mutilated my life, ruined my art, broken the musical chords which make a perfect soul. Even covered with mud I shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you. I

So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.

The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.

The wild Bee reels from bough to bough<br />With his furry coat and his gauzy wing,<br />Now in a lily cup, and now<br />Setting a jacinth bell a-swing,<br />In his wandering.

The story of mankind began in a garden and ended in revelations.

The Governor was strong upon<br />The Regulation Act:<br />The Doctor said that Death was but<br />A scientific fact:<br />And twice a day the Chaplain called,<br />And left a little tract.

A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of herself. -Author Unknown As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.

What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless.

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.

Would you be in any way offended if I said that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection?

Always be a little unexpected.

The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

Talent borrows, genius steals!

The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.

The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind.

Selfishness is not living your life as you wish to live it. Selfishness is wanting others to live their lives as you wish them to.

We live, I regret to say, in an age of Big Data hype.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

Hard work is amply the refuge of those who have nothing to do.

After a good quality dinner one will be able to forgive anybody, still one's own relations.

I like my food dry. Not sick, not even dying, dead.

Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.

It was only in the theatre that I lived

Life is too short to be taken seriously.