Oscar Wilde Quotes

"If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism."

"What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with any woman so long as he doesn't love her"

"Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude."

"Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it"

"Whenever cannibals are on the brink of starvation, Heaven, in its infinite mercy, sends them a nice plump missionary"

"Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it."

"Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves."

"From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it."

"Only my own genius."

"A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude"

"Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."

"The Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says."

"What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?"

"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."

"Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain."

"The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them."

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

"Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac."

"The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring."

"They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins."