Oscar Wilde

It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind. -Algernon

Nothing worth knowing can be taught.

There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.

There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us.

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center of pain.

Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them.

And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of Spring,<br /> And the rose-bud breaks into pink on the climbing briar,<br /> And the crocus-bed is a quivering moon of fire<br /> Girdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring.

Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.

To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.

The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.

I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.

I analyzed you, though you did not adore me.

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true.

I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.

Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failures.

Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.

How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?

Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days. Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

She is a peacock in everything but beauty!

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.

I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.

It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously