Oscar Wilde

Millionaire models are rare enough; but, by Jove, model millionaires are rarer still!

Men always want to be a womans first love women like to be a mans last romance.

The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Ah, well, then I suppose I shall have to die beyond my means.

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Ultimately the bond of all companionship whether in marriage or in friendship is conversation.

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

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.

We are each our own devil and we make this world our hell.

Credit is a young mans capital.

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

A true friend stabs you in the front.

A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

You can only be yourself everybody else is taken.

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

Ignorance is like a delicate fruit touch it and the bloom is gone.

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then only at dinner parties.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.

We women adore failures. They lean on us.

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

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

It is better to repent a sin than regret the loss of a pleasure.

Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again there is no use in reading it at all.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.

When one is in love one always begins by deceiving ones self and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

To deny ones own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of ones own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

She is a peacock in everything but beauty.

I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.

Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.

The true mystery of the world is the visible not the invisible.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in 'Dorian Gray' - a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

If you dont get everything you want think of the things you dont get that you dont want.

When a love comes to an end, weaklings cry, efficient ones instantly find another love, and the wise already have one in reserve.

Never love anybody that treats you like you're ordinary.

Those who are faithful know only the pleasures of love it is the faithless who know loves tragedies.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.

It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produced a false impression.

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

Rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians.

It is absurd to say that the age of miracles is past. It has not yet begun.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

A mans face is his autobiography. A womans face is her work of fiction.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

I like talking to a brick wall its the only thing in the world that never contradicts me

Women treat us men like humanity treats gods and they worship us and keep bothering us to do something.

The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Lean on principles, one day they'll end up giving way.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter she is perfectly satisfied.

In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

Hearts live by being wounded.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Nowadays, saying what you really think can be a serious error since one risks being misunderstood.

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

My first impressions of people are invariably right. right people.

Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up

Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.

Grass is hard and lumpy and damp and full of dreadful black insects.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

Tread lightly she is near under snow speak gently she can hear the daisies grow.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.

To be born or at any rate bred in a hand bag whether it had handles or not seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence.

The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.