Quotes by Oscar Wilde

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about lifes sores the better.

If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

She is a peacock in everything but beauty.

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate ones reason; bad people stir ones imagination.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

All art is quite useless.

True friends stab you in the front.

An excellent man he has no enemies and none of his friends like him.

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.