Quotes by Oscar Wilde

Why is it that at a bachelors 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 myself and a young person.

Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of ones worse habits.

Lady Windermere: Windermere and I married for love.Duchess of Berwick: Yes, we begin like that. It was only Berwicks brutal and incessant threats of suicide that made me accept him at all, and before the year was out, he was running after all kinds of petticoats, every colour, every shape, every material.

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

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on ones nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

If one plays good music, people dont listen, and if one plays bad music people dont talk.

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. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.

tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didnt think it polite to listen, sir.

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

It was always once springtime in my heart.

I am very pleased you like my stories. They are studies in prose, put for Romances sake into fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find simplicity in a subtle strangeness.

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even ones own relations.

I cant help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who havent got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

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

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

From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power.

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

[Letter to William Ward, 11 July 1878]Dear Boy, Why don’t you write to me? I don’t know what has become of you.As for me I am ruined. The law suit is going against me and I am afraid I will have to pay costs, which means leaving Oxford and doing some horrid work to earn bread. The world is too much for me.However, I have seen Greece and had some golden days of youth. I go back to Oxford immediately for viva voce and then think of rowing up the river to town with Frank Miles. Will you come? YoursOscar