Quotes by Oscar Wilde

Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a hucksters scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you.

Ah! Happy they whose hearts can breakAnd peace of pardon win!How else may man make straight his pathAnd cleanse his soul from sin?How else but through a broken heartMay the Lord Christ enter in?

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

I dont want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a a shame in a woman to be an infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or if seen, not regarded.

One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable.

Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.

You are perfectly right in making some slight alteration. Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good.

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.

the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.

loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.

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

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: … But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, Im neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.(Act I., lines 132-140)

If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.

The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.