Quotes by Oscar Wilde
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You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?

The only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

What fire does not destroy, it hardens.

I drink to separate my body from my soul.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.

People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.

At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.

Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect -- simply a confession of failures.

It is he who has broken the bond of marriage -- not I. I only break its bondage.

I often take exercise. Why only yesterday I had breakfast in bed.

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that.

There can be nothing more frequent than an occasional drink.

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.

He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone.

Man is many things, but he is not rational.

Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women...merely adored.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

To look at a thing is very different from seeing it.

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

Personally, I have a great admiration for stupidity.

We Irish will never achieve anything; but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.

Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes see nothing save their own unlovely woe, Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know.

Marriage is a long, dull meal with dessert served at the beginning.

Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid.

Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.

Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.

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.

The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.

It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.

True contentment is not having everything, but in being satisfied with everything you have.

Bad artists always admire each others work.

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

Lean on principles, one day they'll end up giving way.

The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar.

Everyone may not be good, but there's always something good in everyone. Never judge anyone shortly because every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

Utterly, irrevocably, lost.

The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.

Nothing worth knowing can be taught.

Ones real life is often the life that one does not lead.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.

Tread Lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow.

I tried to visit Albania but I couldn't find it on the map.

The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.

The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.

When good Americans die they go to Paris.

Before Turner there was no fog in London.

I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in my life.

To be good is to be in harmony with oneself. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.

I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them.

The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.

Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.

Every woman is wrong until she cries.

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

I can't stand people that do not take food seriously.

They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

They've promised that dreams can come true -- but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.

God grant me the serenity to accept that people are ignorant, the courage to uphold the law when I'm hostile, and the wisdom to realize that murder is illegal.

One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends.

Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success.

High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.

To reveal the art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Time is a waste of money.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.

Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a
sacrament that should be taken kneeling.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

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

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

The secret of life is in art.

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known.

The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one's own perfection, to make one's every dream a reality.

My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.

Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.

Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working.

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.