Oscar Wilde

Life would be dull without them.

Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.

One can only give an unbiased opinion about things that do not interest one, which is no doubt the reason an unbiased opinion is always valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.

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

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune... to lose both seems like carelessness.

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.

If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.

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

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.

For his mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.

Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.

Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.

Popularity is the only insult that has not yet been offered to Mr. Whistler.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

I know not whether Laws be right or whether Laws be wrong; all that we know who live in goal is that the wall is strong; and that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.

What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?