Thursday 24 December 2009

Heartfelt wishes

was attending a wedding reception.while handing over the gift to the couple, presented my best smile, n wished "many many happy returns of the day". they had an instant strange look on their faces. a mixture of so many emotions. still thinking what it cud be.

Wednesday 2 December 2009

Few quotes from Oscar Wilde

here goes a few gems from my most favorite english author (along with GBS)

Quotes and Quotations
Memorable Quotes and quotations from Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde Irish dramatist, novelist, & poet (1854 - 1900)


Oscar Wilde -
- Nothing is so aggravating as calmness.

Oscar Wilde -
- A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

Oscar Wilde - Jack from The Importance of Being Earnest
- When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.

Oscar Wilde -
- We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest
- I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all.

Oscar Wilde -
- The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Oscar Wilde -
- Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Oscar Wilde -
- Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

Oscar Wilde -
- Democracy is the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, chapter 6
- When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.

Oscar Wilde -
- 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.

Oscar Wilde -
- Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

Oscar Wilde - An Ideal Husband
- The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women? merely adored.

Oscar Wilde -
- I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

Oscar Wilde -
- Beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.

Oscar Wilde -
- The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Oscar Wilde -
- Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Oscar Wilde -
- Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.

Oscar Wilde -
- Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Oscar Wilde -
- Divorces are made in heaven.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Oscar Wilde -
- To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Oscar Wilde -
- There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

Oscar Wilde -
- About foxhunting: The unspeakable chasing the uneatable.

Oscar Wilde -
- Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Oscar Wilde -
- Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray
- Sin is the only real colour element left in modern life.

Oscar Wilde -
- Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray
- Knowledge would be fatal, it is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things beautiful.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey
- People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

Oscar Wilde -
- To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

Oscar Wilde - As he passed through customs
- I have nothing to declare but my genius.

Oscar Wilde -
- Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

Oscar Wilde -
- Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.

Oscar Wilde -
- 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.

Oscar Wilde -
- Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Oscar Wilde -
- Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.

Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895, Act I
- To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

Oscar Wilde -
- Punctuality is the thief of time.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

Oscar Wilde -
- Genius is born--not paid.

Oscar Wilde - The Critic as Artist, 1891
- The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Oscar Wilde -
- It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

Oscar Wilde -
- Eduaction is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Oscar Wilde - A Picture of Dorian Grey
- Live the wonderful life that is in you.

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

Oscar Wilde -
- Only the shallow know themselves.

Oscar Wilde -
- The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.

Oscar Wilde -
- Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

Oscar Wilde - A Woman of No Importance, Act 3
- The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.

Oscar Wilde -
- America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Oscar Wilde -
- Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Oscar Wilde -
- Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, the preface
- All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde -
- Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

Oscar Wilde -
- One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

Oscar Wilde -
- While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first is personality, which no one should copy; the second is perfection, which all should aim at.

Oscar Wilde -
- What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.

Oscar Wilde -
- Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

Oscar Wilde - In Life of Oscar Wilde, H. Pearson
- Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

Oscar Wilde -
- Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, the preface
- It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Oscar Wilde -
- Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

Oscar Wilde -
- Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

Oscar Wilde -
- Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde -
- The only charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties.

Oscar Wilde -
- I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.

Oscar Wilde -
- There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

Oscar Wilde -
- Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Oscar Wilde -
- Biography lends to death a new terror.

Oscar Wilde -
- One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

Oscar Wilde -
- The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Oscar Wilde -
- A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

Oscar Wilde -
- All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Oscar Wilde - upon being told the cost of an operation
- I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

Oscar Wilde -
- It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give really unbiased opinions, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always valueless.

Oscar Wilde -
- Work is the curse of the drinking class.

Oscar Wilde -
- The English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

Oscar Wilde -
- The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Oscar Wilde -
- Dreamers can find their way by moonlight and their only punishment is that they see the dawn before the rest of the world.

Oscar Wilde -
- I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Oscar Wilde -
- At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

Oscar Wilde -
- Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship; and it is by far the best ending for one.

Oscar Wilde -
- There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

Oscar Wilde - Foreward, The Picture of Dorian gray
- The only excuse for creating something useless is that one admires it intensely.

Oscar Wilde -
- I am not young enough to know everything.

Oscar Wilde -
- Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Oscar Wilde -
- Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Oscar Wilde -
- Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

Oscar Wilde -
- To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.

Oscar Wilde - "The Remarkable Rocket"
- The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.

Oscar Wilde -
- As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Oscar Wilde -
- It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.

Oscar Wilde - An Ideal husband, 1893
- When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

Oscar Wilde -
- My wallpaper and i are fighting a duel to death. One or the other has to go.

Oscar Wilde -
- Education is an admirable thing, but it is well worth remembering from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Oscar Wilde -
- I am not young enough to know everything.

Oscar Wilde -
- I am not young enough to know everything.

Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray
- When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

Oscar Wilde -
- Art is the most intense form of individualism that the world has known.

Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Ernest
- The very essence of love is uncertainty.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey
- Philanthropic people lose all sense of Humanity, it is their distinguishing characteristic.

Oscar Wilde -
- Life imitates art more than art imitates life.

Oscar Wilde -
- Philanthropy is the refuge of rich people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures.

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

Oscar Wilde -
- Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Oscar Wilde - Letter from Paris, dated May 1900
- People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately.

Oscar Wilde -
- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Oscar Wilde - The Critic as Artist, 1891
- It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey
- All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.

Oscar Wilde - The Critic as Artist, part 2, 1891
- One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Oscar Wilde -
- Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey
- There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

Oscar Wilde -
- Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same

Oscar Wilde -
- We can forgive a man for making a useful thing, as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde -
- Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

Oscar Wilde -
- A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.

Oscar Wilde -
- Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

Oscar Wilde -
- The basis for optimism is sheer terror.

Oscar Wilde -
- I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Oscar Wilde -
- Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

Oscar Wilde - A Picture of Dorian Grey - Preface
- We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde -
- Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

Oscar Wilde -
- Imagination is a quality given to man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humaor is provided to console him from what he is.

Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest
- He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows.

Oscar Wilde -
- Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- ...my dear boy, no woman is a genius. They are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

Oscar Wilde - Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, 1882
- Only the shallow know themselves.

Oscar Wilde -
- Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.

Oscar Wilde - "De Profundis"
- ... Nature, whose sweet rains fall of just and unjust alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undetected. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

Oscar Wilde -
- It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Oscar Wilde -
- I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

Oscar Wilde -
- Action: the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

Oscar Wilde -
- Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.

Oscar Wilde -
- Life is too important to be taken seriously.

Oscar Wilde - The Ballad of Reading Gaol
- 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.

Oscar Wilde - The Model Millionaire, 1912
- It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Oscar Wilde -
- One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Oscar Wilde - , in a letter to his friend, Frances Forbes-Robertson, who had invited him to her wedding in London, but Wilde was
- Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success.

Oscar Wilde -
- Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Oscar Wilde -
- The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk.

Oscar Wilde -
- Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.

Oscar Wilde - The Critic as Artist, part 2, 1891
- A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

Oscar Wilde -
- The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

Oscar Wilde -
- Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.

Oscar Wilde -
- As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have its fascinations. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

Oscar Wilde -
- Why was I born with such contemporaries?

Oscar Wilde -
- I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

Oscar Wilde - "An Ideal Husband"
- To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

Oscar Wilde - as he sipped champagne on his deathbed
- Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

Oscar Wilde -
- Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, the preface
- All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their own peril.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

Oscar Wilde -
- Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Oscar Wilde -
- The problem with the common person is that he is so unbearably common!

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Oscar Wilde -
- It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.

Oscar Wilde -
- The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture, and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Oscar Wilde -
- Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde -
- Chastity is the greatest form of perversion.

Oscar Wilde -
- The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.

Oscar Wilde -
- Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

Oscar Wilde -
- The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

Oscar Wilde -
- The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.

Oscar Wilde -
- Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde -
- The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling I have always cultivated.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, Prologue
- All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- A grand passion is the privelege of people who have nothing to do.

Oscar Wilde -
- Science is the record of dead religions.

Oscar Wilde -
- The English country gentleman galloping after a fox -- the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

Oscar Wilde - The Canterville Ghost, 1882
- We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.

Oscar Wilde -
- Experience...is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Oscar Wilde -
- Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.

Oscar Wilde -
- Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude.

Oscar Wilde -
- Sometimes it takes courage to give into temptation.

Oscar Wilde -
- Oscar Wilde: "I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar; you will.

Oscar Wilde -
- What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde - as he sipped champagne on his deathbed
- Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

Oscar Wilde - The Critic as Artist, 1891
- But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
...Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.

Oscar Wilde -
- As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.

Oscar Wilde -
- The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Oscar Wilde -
- America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.

Oscar Wilde -
- It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Oscar Wilde -
- The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 3
- Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

Oscar Wilde -
- The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

Oscar Wilde -
- Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

Oscar Wilde -
- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Oscar Wilde -
- A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

Oscar Wilde -
- Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray
- Being natural is simply a pose.

Oscar Wilde -
- Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

Oscar Wilde -
- Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Oscar Wilde -
- Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895, Act I
- The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Oscar Wilde -
- The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- She is a peacock in everything but beauty.

Oscar Wilde -
- It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Oscar Wilde -
- America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Oscar Wilde -
- A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Oscar Wilde -
- Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Oscar Wilde -
- Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Oscar Wilde - "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
- One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

Oscar Wilde -
- Conscience and cowardice are really the same thing. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm.

Oscar Wilde -
- There is no sin except stupidity.

Oscar Wilde -
- I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde -
- It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

Oscar Wilde - An Ideal Husband, 1893, Act I
- Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

Oscar Wilde -
- Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray
- Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Oscar Wilde - Quoted in Ellmann
- It often happens that the real tragedies in life occur in such an inarticulate manner that they hurt one by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

Oscar Wilde -
- Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891, preface
- There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

Oscar Wilde -
- Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Oscar Wilde -
- Only the shallow know themselves.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.

Oscar Wilde -
- I sometimes think that God, in creating man, overestimated His ability.

Oscar Wilde -
- Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist.

Oscar Wilde -
- One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

Oscar Wilde -
- To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Oscar Wilde -
- Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.

Oscar Wilde -
- To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

Oscar Wilde -
- I have the simplest of tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

Oscar Wilde -
- Action is the last refuge of those who cannot dream.

Oscar Wilde -
- A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Oscar Wilde -
- Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

Oscar Wilde -
- A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Oscar Wilde - The Ballad of Reading Gaol
- Vile deeds like poison weeds bloom well in prison air, it is only what is good in man, that wastes and withers there.

Oscar Wilde -
- Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Oscar Wilde -
- Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.