Quotes by Oscar Wilde

Thats always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because theyre pretty. Its like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.

It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity, But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.

I would sooner lose my best friend than my worst enemy. To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.

Are ALL men bad?Oh, all of them, my dear, all of them, without any exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good..

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

If it was my business, I wouldnt talk about it. It is very vulgar to talk about ones business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties.

You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color 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.

The one charm about the past is that it is the past.

MISS PRISMMemory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.

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

Silently we went round and round,And through each hollow mindThe memory of dreadful thingsRushed like a dreadful wind,And horror stalked before each man,And terror crept behind.

Bronze-limbed and well-knit, like a statue wrought by a Grecian, he stood on the sand with his back to the moon, and out of the foam came white arms that beckoned to him, and out of the waves rose dim forms that did him homage. Before him lay his shadow, which was the body of his Soul, and behind him hung the moon in the honey-coloured air.

The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.

Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices.

If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.

My dear fellow, it isnt easy to be anything nowadays. Theres such a lot of beastly competition about.

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.

To realise ones nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and hell tell you the truth

Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?