Quotes by Oscar Wilde

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project ones soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear ones own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey ones temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims....

It is the duty of every father... to write fairy tales for his children.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them

Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with lifes sores and maladies merely, but with lifes joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious

Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid.Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.

It was winter, and a night of bitter cold. The snow lay thick upon the ground, and upon the branches of the trees: the frost kept snapping the little twigs on either side of them, as they passed: and when they came to the Mountain-Torrent she was hanging motionless in air, for the Ice-King had kissed her.

Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.

The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.

How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.

It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world

She...can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it.

I want to be good. I cant bear the idea of my soul being hideous.

I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.