Oscar Wilde Quotes on Pleasure (26 Quotes)

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.

You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can you want?

Jack? . . . No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed. It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations . . . I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain. Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment's solitude. The only really safe name is Ernest.

Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.

Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.

I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.

Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important.

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young

To get into the best society nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people.

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.

The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.

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

What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one's death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up.

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want.

The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.

Those who are faithless know the pleasures of love it is the faithful who know love's tragedies

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly deceived

If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.

The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret.

Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex.