Quotes by Oscar Wilde

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

Well, I dont like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth dont you go up and change? Its perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.

A mans life is of more value than a womans. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a mans life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacrifice to me, a useless sacrifice.

I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.A dream of form in days of thought:

You told me you had destroyed it.I was wrong. It has destroyed me.

because to influence a person is to give ones own soul.

There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.

What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! exclaimed Lord Henry. A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.

My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.

Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy…

What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than begin talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.

She lives in the poetry she cannot write.

Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination

. . . try as we may we cannot get behind things to the reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in things apart from their appearances.

But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for ones morals to see bad acting.

Dorian, Dorian, she cried, before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came—oh, my beautiful love!— and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection.

He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.

I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love.

I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.