Oscar Wilde

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.

I expect I shall have to die beyond my means.

A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime.

As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.

Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.

The great events of the world take place in the brain...

The English country gentleman galloping after the fox Ђ' the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.

In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.\' \'I hate them for it,\' cried Hallward. \'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. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.

It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.

Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.

I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.

Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.

Liberty is the chosen <br /> resort of the artistic <br /> shopper.

The true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything.

What you read when you don't have to...

Never so sweet a repast as the Reaper's when you tread upon the threshold of a Quiznos.

The world belongs to the discontented.