Oscar Wilde

"When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not developed their personalities. Jesus moved in a community that allowed the accumulation of private property just as ours does, and the gospel that he preached was not that in such a community it is an advantage for a man to live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear ragged, unwholesome clothes, to sleep in horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and a disadvantage for a man to live under healthy, pleasant, and decent conditions. Such a view would have been wrong. ... What Jesus meant, was this. He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your perfection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.’"

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

"Oma silm on kuningas. (EVS)"

"Il n'est si bonne compagnie qu'on ne quitte."

"Walk the talk. (Manser, 2007)"

"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."

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

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

"She is not a subject."

"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."

"I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram."

"He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him."

"People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately..."

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

"Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."

"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 tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."

"On George Bernard Shaw An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him."

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

"All art is immoral."

"Tread Lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow."

"le mystère de l'amour est plus grand que le mystère de la mort."

"Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event."

"The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition."

"And down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet, Crept like a frightened girl."

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

"If it took Labouchere three columns to prove that I was forgotten, then there is no difference between fame and obscurity."

"We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language."

"It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal."

"All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction."

"Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood."

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."

"From its earliest years every American child spends most of its time in correcting the faults of its father and mother; and no one who has had the opportunity of watching an American family on the deck of an Atlantic steamer, or in the refined seclusion of a New York boarding-house, can fail to have been struck by this characteristic of their civilisation. In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience. A boy of only eleven or twelve years of age will firmly but kindly point out to his father his defects of manner or temper; will never weary of warning him against extravagance, idleness, late hours, unpunctuality, and the other temptations to which the aged are so particularly exposed; and sometimes, should he fancy that he is monopolising too much of the conversation at dinner, will remind him, across the table, of the new child's adage, 'Parents should be seen, not heard.'"

"A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle."

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

"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."

"And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."

"Lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance — And must I lose a soul's inheritance?"

"The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Tsǔ spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things."

"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."