Oscar Wilde

Life is too short to learn German

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.

The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

Every woman is a rebel.

To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not - there is no weakness in that.

Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow on another like the withered leaves of Autumn.

Nature constantly imitates art.

The final mystery is oneself... Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul.

It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. Life makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.

By the artificial separation of soul and body men have invented a Realism that is vulgar and an Idealism that is void.

I put my talent in my work, I save my Genius for my life.

It is absurd to say that the age of miracles is past. It has not yet begun.

Varnishing is the only artistic process with which Royal Academicians are thoroughly familiar.

I live constantly in the fear of not being misunderstood.

It is what we fear that happens to us.

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.

There is no such thing as romance in our day, women have become too brilliant; nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman.

Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.

Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance

You are young. No hungry generations tread you down. The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost

Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris.

Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.

Newspapers. . . give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details. . .

There is a tiny yellow daffodil, The butterfly can see it from afar, Although one summer evening's dew could fill Its little cup twice over, ere the star Had called the lazy shepherd to his fold, And be no prodigal.

To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.