Oscar Wilde

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

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, none knew so well as I: for he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.

How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say.

The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.

A kiss may ruin a human life.

Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.

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

I am not young enough to know everything.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves from all let this be heard some does it with a bitter look some with a flattering word the coward does it with a kiss the brave man with the sword.

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

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

I can believe anything provided it is incredible.

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.

Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses -- once!

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

The American father is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher.

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

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment the universal.

And now, I am dying beyond my means. [Sipping champagne on his deathbed]

Flowers are as common in the country as people are in London.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?