Oscar Wilde

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

"Tell me, when you are alone with him [ Max Beerbohm ] Sphinx, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?"

"One can survive everything nowadays except death."

"He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives."

"Psycholog­y is in its infancy, as a science. I hope in the interests of Art, it will always remain so."

"I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lip."

"Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence."

"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 warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring."

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."

"Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime."

"After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second glass you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world."

"She is not a subject."

"For to disagree with three-fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity, one of the deepest consolations in all moments of spiritual doubt."

"God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too."

"And he related also, with much gusto, how in a country-house he had told his host one evening that he had spent the day in hard literary work, and that, when asked what he had done, he had said, "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma." "And in the afternoon?" "In the afternoon–well, I put it back again.""

"Fool, nothing is impossible in Russia but reform."

"Reforms in Russia are very tragic, but they always end in a farce."

"To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist – the problem is so entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar."

"Life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it."

"There is always more brass than brains in an aristocracy."

"Good kings are the enemies of democracy."

"Heaven is a despotism. I shall be at home there."

"There are few things easier than to live badly and to die well."

"Experience, the name men give to their mistakes."

"Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities."

"When a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him."

"I cannot understand your nature. If my nature had been made to suit your comprehension rather than my own requirements, I am afraid I would have made a very poor figure in the world."

"To drift with every passion till my soul Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, Is it for this that I have given away Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control? Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll Scrawled over on some boyish holiday With idle songs for pipe and virelay, Which do but mar the secret of the whole."

"She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses," cried the young Student; "but in all my garden there is no red rose."

"Be happy, be happy; you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's-blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty."

"Why, what a wonderful piece of luck! Here is a red rose! I have never seen any rose like it in all my life. It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name."

"Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do."

"[E]verybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching."

"If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture...In a house, we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure."

"It is always the unreadable that occurs."

"His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning."

"Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life."

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

"The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art."

"Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose."

"Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it."

"There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other—by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought."

"Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography."

"Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived."

"Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read."

"Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint beauty for a moment. It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."

"I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood."

"The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it."

"It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest."

"Action ... is the last resource of those who know not how to dream."