Oscar Wilde Quotes (991 Quotes)

I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.

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

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.

Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

The people who have adored me-- there have not been very many, but there have been some-- have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.

What are you? To define is to limit.

Now produce your explanation and pray make it improbable.

Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

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

There is a fatality about good resolutions - that they are always made too late

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.

Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

I am happy in my prison of passion

It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.

Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.

I really don't see what is so romantic about proposing. One may be accepted - one usually is, I believe - and then the excitement is ended. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where all intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes al nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.

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

Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty.

What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.

There seemed to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

Yes Harry I believe that is true. I cannot help telling you things. You have a curious influence over me. If I ever did a crime I would come and confess it to you. You would understand me.