Oscar Wilde

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before.

Self-denial is simply a method by which arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage.

The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great.

He must have a truly romantic nature, for he weeps when there is nothing at all to weep about.

Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her something like a public building.

It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless.

The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory.

America is one long expectoration.

Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.

I don't recognize you - I've changed a lot.

I never play cricket. It requires one to assume such indecent postures.

However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive.

Really, if the lower orders don't set a good example, what on earth is the use of them?

Whenever cannibals are on the brink of starvation, Heaven, in its infinite mercy, sends them a fat missionary.

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.

Tell the cook of this restaurant with my compliments that these are the very worst sandwiches in the whole world, and that, when I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it.

Married men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.

The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.

The only thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them.

The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity.

We women adore failures. They lean on us.

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.

Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.

I don't like principles. I prefer prejudices.

Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age.