"I find that alcohol, if taken in sufficient quantities, can help bring about all of the effects of drunkenness."
"A good friend will always stab you in the front."
"Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much."
"Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."
"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
"If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life."
"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
"Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."
"Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed."
"One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry."
"The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray"
"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
"There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."
"When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers."
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong."
"Women are made to be loved, not understood."
"How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being?"
"Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."
"I am not young enough to know everything."
"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."
"Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
"Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."
"The heart was made to be broken."
"Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes."
"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his."
"I never travel without my diary. One must always have something sensational to read on the train."
"I can resist anything except temptation."
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."
"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
"Who, being loved, is poor?"
"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."
"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."
"I have nothing to declare except my genius."
"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it."
"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."
"No good deed goes unpunished."
"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
"You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear."
"Every woman is a rebel."
"With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?"
"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."
"The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last."
"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike."
"Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do."
"The world is a stage and the play is badly cast."
"Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life."
"When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance."
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
"Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success."
"We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell."
"To define is to limit."
"There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely - or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands."
"Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them."
"Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious."
"Everything in moderation, including moderation."
"Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them."
"A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company."
"To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable."
"Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer."
"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing."
"There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up."
"The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself."
"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
"Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic."
"Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different."
"We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities."
"The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death."
"I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world."
"Life is too short to learn German."
"Yes, death. 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 to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death's house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is."
"After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relatives."
"I don't say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could"
"The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out."
"Only the shallow know themselves."
"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
"Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?"
"Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative."
"It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it."
"I never put off 'til tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after."
"The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork."
"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one."
"Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."
"Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not."
"Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties."
"All art is quite useless."
"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
"Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives."
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes."
"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."
"Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping."
"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."
"I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean."
"Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets."
"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
"The play was a great success, but the audience was a total failure."
"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards."
"Everything popular is wrong."
"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius."
"Misfortunes one can endure - they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults - ah! - there is the sting of life."
"Illusion is the first of all pleasures."
"A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her."
"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody."
"I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself."
"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."
"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."
"Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you."
"Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others."
"How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?"
"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."
"I love acting. It is so much more real than life."
"Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground."
"Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered."
"She can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it."
"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."
"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 a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring."
"Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess."
"What of Art?<br />
-It is a malady.<br />
--Love?<br />
-An Illusion.<br />
--Religion?<br />
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.<br />
--You are a sceptic.<br />
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.<br />
--What are you?<br />
-To define is to limit."
"I can believe anything provided it is incredible."
"To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him."
"One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing."
"Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies."
"Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing."
"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."
"To be popular one must be a mediocrity."
"One should always be a little improbable."
"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."
"What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"
"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."
"The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life."
"Some things are more precious because they don't last long."
"The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves."
"Ambition is the last refuge of the failure."
"I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy."
"Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders."
"Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never happened or couldn't possibly have happened."
"All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril."
"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection."
"Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation."
"She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain."
"For one moment our lives met, our souls touched."
"When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything equal to it."
"I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever."
"America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up."
"A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks."
"I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else."
"Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping."
"A kiss may ruin a human life."
"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."
"The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream."
"You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties."
"Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out."
"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."
"Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other."
"To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life."
"When you really want love you will find it waiting for you."
"Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer."
"I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real."
"Truth is independent of facts always."
"The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."
"'It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.'"
"The great events of the world take place in the brain..."
"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
"I love to talk about nothing, it's the only thing I know anything about."
"It is awfully hard work doing nothing."
"Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is."
"It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously."
"I beg your pardon I didn't recognise you - I've changed a lot."
"The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving."
"Where there is no love there is no understanding."
"In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place."
"Wisdom comes with winters."
"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."
"To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity."
"They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too."
"Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about."
"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all."
"Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play... I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend."
"Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic."
"Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful."
"One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar."
"Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."
"If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first."
"I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue."
"It's the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."
"Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself."
"Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good."
"We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow."
"She knew nothing but she had everything he had lost."
Oscar Wilde