Oscar Wilde

I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss.

In fact, now you mention the subject, I have been very bad in my own small way. I don't think you should be so proud of that, though I am sure it must have been very pleasant.

I hope to-morrow will be a fine day, Lane. It never is, sir. Lane, you're a perfect pessimist. I do my best to give satisfaction, sir.

Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not quite old enough to do that.

Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid. Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.

JACK That is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury. ALGERNON Then your wife will. You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none. JACK That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years. ALGERNON Yes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time.

To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.

Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving invitations.

Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.

Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information. I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand. Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that? I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between mysel

One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had don

Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.

The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.

Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination.

When people talk to me about the weather, I always feel they mean something else.

Be yourself, because others are already taken.

The ability of the theist to misunderstand a thing is directly proportional to the obviousness of the thing.

Intuition is a strange instinct that tells a woman she is right, whether she is or not.

The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.

What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?

A grapefruit is just a lemon that saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture...

I have no objection to anyone's sex life as long as they don't practice it in the street and frighten the horses.

There is nothing that art cannot express.

I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.

I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.

There is no good talking to him,\' said a Dragon-fly, who was sitting on the top of a large brown bulrush; \'no good at all, for he has gone away.\' \'Well, that is his loss, not mine,\' answered the Rocket. \'I am not going to stop talking to him merely because he pays no attention. I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.\' \'Then you should definitely lecture on Philos