Oscar Wilde

The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the consequence of its work but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also.

We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone.

In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.

While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.

The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.

And, by the way, one of the most delightful things I find in America is meeting a people without prejudice -- everywhere open to the truth.

Indeed, so far from being humorous, the male American is the most abnormally serious creature who ever existed.. It is only fair to admit that he can exaggerate, but even his exaggeration has a rational basis. It is not founded on wit or fancy; it does not spring from any poetic imagination.

Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.

If people were meant to be nude, they would have been born this way.

A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen.

People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.

If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. but if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would move back again and again and beg to be admitted so that I might share in what I was entitled to share. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation.

Placerea este testul naturii, semnul ei aprobator

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

What is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means?

Fruitcake is like semen, there's a lot of it about but no one wants to swallow it

Nature is a wet place where large numbers of ducks fly overhead uncooked.

Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.

Friendship never forgets. That is the wonderful thing about it.

As a wicked man I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back.

I don't like Switzerland; it has produced nothing but theologians and waiters.

You know what a woman's curiosity is.

It is he who has broken the bond of marriage - not I. I only break its bondage.

To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders...It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.

There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.

And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.

Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.

Its a beautiful woman's fate to be the subject of conversation where ever she goes

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.