Oscar Wilde

Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such <br /> a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.

Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.

The ugly can be beautiful. The pretty, never.

Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.

Art, like Nature, has her monsters

Just be your self. Everybody else is already taken.

It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.

I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.

Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills.

I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them...

Art persists, it timelessly continues.

What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.

Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.

Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you.

Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.

The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious...

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

Give children beauty, not the record of bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls, as they call history, or of the latitude and longitude of places nobody cares to visit, as they call geography.

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.

Don't be discouraged if your children reject your advice. Years later they will offer it to their own offspring.

I am afraid that woman appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.

People may fail many times, but they become failures only when they begin to blame someone else. Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

An opinion is not necesarily correct just because you're willing to die for it.

What the hell is an oboe?

There's no sin but stupidity.

Poets know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.

There is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage: a marriage in which there is love, but on one side only.

The only sin is stupidity.

The only way to get rid of tempation is to yeild to it.