Oscar Wilde

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.

The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.

A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position.

Pleasure without Champagne is purely artificial.

Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. ... One might point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great, individual men. One might point out how Louis XIV, by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist ...

Progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority.

Without order nothing can exist-without chaos nothing can evolve. Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.

I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.

It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

In married life three is company and two none.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.