Quotes by Oscar Wilde

“One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.”

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

“It is perfectly monstrous, he said, at last, the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind ones back that are absolutely and entirely true.”

“Even things that are true can be proved.”

“Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.”

“Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not.”

“The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.”

“Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig.”

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

“I really dont see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, Ill certainly try to forget the fact.”

“She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. ”

“She lives the poetry she cannot write.”

“Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.”

“Hearts Live By Being Wounded”

“Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.”

“A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.”

“Hearts are made to be broken.”

“One should always be in love. Thats the reason one should never marry.”

“I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? 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.”

“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”