Oscar Wilde

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

All art is quite useless.

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.

When good Americans die they go to Paris.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.