Quotes by Oscar Wilde

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

And to the little Squirrel who lived in the fir-tree, and was lonely, he said, Where is my mother? And the Squirrel answered, Thou hast slain mine. Dost thou seek to slay thine also?

As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.

Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.

To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

Men always want to be a woman`s first love - women like to be a man`s last romance.

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.

You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person!

Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian...I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does. I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.

Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.

The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.

I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

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

The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.