Quotes by Oscar Wilde

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.

Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity?

You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.

Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. 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.

Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but theyre better.

It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.

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

Life at times loses its sense of reality; it appears to us like a weird, optical illusion - a phantasmagoric bubble that will disappear at the slightest breath.

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

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.

So overjoyed were they at their deliverance that they laughed aloud, and the Earth seemed to them like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold.

I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows.

The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice.

Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry.Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?Before either.I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry, said the lad.Then you shall come; and you will come, too, Basil, wont you?I cant, really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do.Well, then you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray.I should like that awfully.The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. I shall stay with the real Dorian, he said, sadly.

Outside the family circle, papa, Im glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.

Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.

We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces