Oscar Wilde

"If we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it."

"I don't at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited."

"Now don't stir. I'll be back in five minutes. And don't fall into any temptations while I am away."

"I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse."

"A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it."

"Only good questions deserve good answers."

"It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little."

"The supreme vice is shallowness."

"We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour."

"We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken."

"When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?"

"Where there is sorrow there is holy ground."

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

"For a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."

"All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death;"

"If after I am free a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy by myself. With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy? [...] But if after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. But that could not be. I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God’s secret as any one can get."

"I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky."

"When a voice behind me whispered low, "That fellow's got to swing.""

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!"

"It is sweet to dance to violins When Love and Life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!"

"For Man's grim Justice goes its way, And will not swerve aside: It slays the weak, it slays the strong, It has a deadly stride: With iron heel it slays the strong, The monstrous parricide!"

"For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die."

"Something was dead in each of us, And what was dead was Hope."

"And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, None knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die."

"And alien tears will fill for him Pity's long-broken urn, For his mourners will be outcast men, And outcasts always mourn."

"I know not whether Laws be right, Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long."

"The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in man That wastes and withers there; Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate And the Warder is Despair."

"And all, but Lust, is turned to dust In Humanity's machine."

"How else but through a broken heart May Lord Christ enter in?"

"This too I know—and wise it were If each could know the same— That every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim."

"A pessimist is one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both."

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

"True friends stab you in the front."

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."

"Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it."

"One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."

"When I was young I used to think that money was the most important thing in life. Now that I am old, I know it is."

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."

"Why was I born with such contemporaries?"

"I'm not young enough to know everything."

"I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours."

"Illusion is the first of all pleasures."

"Be Yourself. Everyone Else Is Already Taken."

"An Irish gentleman is someone who can play the bagpipes but won’t."

"From the beginning Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands."

"Despite the number of his books and plays, Mr. Wilde was not, I think, what one calls a born writer. His writing seemed always to be rather an overflow of intellectual temperamental energy than an inevitable, absorbing function. That he never concentrated himself on any one form of literature is a proof that the art of writing never really took hold of him."

"An Assyrian wax statue, effeminate, but with the vitality of twenty men."

"I have had the privilege of listening also to many other masters of table-talk—Meredith James, Augustine Birrell and Arthur Balfour, Gilbert Chesterton and Desmond MacCarthy and Hilaire Belloc—all of them splendid in their own way. But assuredly Oscar in his own way was the greatest of them all—the most spontaneous and yet the most polished, the most soothing and yet the most surprising. That his talk was mostly a monologue was not his own fault. His manners were very good; he was careful to give his guests or his fellow guests many a conversational opening; but seldom did anyone respond with more than a very few words. Nobody was willing to interrupt the music of so magnificent a virtuoso. To have heard him consoled me for not having heard Dr. Johnson or Edmund Burke, Lord Brougham or Sydney Smith."

"That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh. The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it—says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. Therefore is the she fool enamored of the feel of his tongue in her ear to tickle her understanding. The limpid and spiritless vacuity of this intellectual jellyfish is in ludicrous contrast with the rude but robust mental activities that he came to quicken and inspire. Not only has he no thoughts, but no thinker. His lecture is mere verbal ditch-water—meaningless, trite and without coherence. It lacks even the nastiness that exalts and refines his verse. Moreover, it is obviously his own; he had not even the energy and independence to steal it. And so, with a knowledge that would equip an idiot to dispute with a cast-iron dog, and eloquence to qualify him for the duties of a caller on a hog-ranch, and an imagination adequate to the conception of a tom-cat, when fired by contemplation of a fiddle-string, this consummate and star-like youth, missing everywhere his heaven-appointed functions and offices, wanders about, posing as a statue of himself, and, like the sun-smitten image of Memnon, emitting meaningless murmurs in the blaze of women's eyes. He makes me tired. And this gawky gowk has the divine effrontery to link his name with those of Swinburne, Rossetti and Morris—this dunghill he-hen would fly with eagles. He dares to set his tongue to the honored name of Keats. He is the leader, quoth'a, of a renaissance in art, this man who cannot draw—of a revival of letters, this man who cannot write! This little and looniest of a brotherhood of simpletons, whom the wicked wits of London, haling him dazed from his obscurity, have crowned and crucified as King of the Cranks, has accepted the distinction in stupid good faith and our foolish people take him at his word. Mr. Wilde is pinnacled upon a dazzling eminence but the earth still trembles to the dull thunder of the kicks that set him up."

"Leyendo y releyendo, a lo largo de los años, a Wilde, noto un hecho que sus panegiristas no parecen haber sospechado siquiera: el hecho comprobable y elemental de que Wilde, casi siempre, tiene razón."