You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher...

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.

The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.

Il en est toujours ainsi des natures subtiles et raffinées. Il faut que leurs passions ploient ou broient, qu’elles choisissent de tuer ou de mourir. Seules ont la vie longue les peines légères et les...

One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends.

I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet...

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any...

Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.

You don’t seem to realise, that in married life three is company and two is none.

Failure is only the name that we give to our mistakes.”-Oscar Wilde

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

Why can’t these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious...

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: … But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I’m neither. Optimism...

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Everything is going to be fine in the end. If it’s not fine it’s not the end.

No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him…As for the virtuous poor…they have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their...

She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.

The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.

Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

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

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

Life has always poppies in her hands.

The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who...

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

I always pass on good advice, it is the only thing to do with it.It is never of any use to oneself.

When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.

I love to talk about nothing. It’s the only thing I know anything about.

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.

I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five

I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.

My gods dwell in temples made with hands.

One should always be in love. That’s the reason one should never marry.

I won’t tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world’s voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has...

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around...

Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is...

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates Individualism. But that is not to trouble them. They are to be...

It was always once springtime in my heart.

How pale the Princess is! Never have I seen her so pale. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver.

And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.