Oscar Wilde
224 quotations
There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.
Scandal: gossip made tedious by morality.
Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
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.
A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people's toes.
A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.
Life is too important to be taken seriously.
He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
There is no sin except stupidity.
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Skepticism is the beginning of Faith.
What is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.
To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.
When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.
Never speak disrespectfully of Society. Only people who can't get into it do that.
Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.
Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
Talk to a woman as if you loved her, and to a man as if he bored you.
The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.
The greatest of all sins is stupidity.
Nothing succeeds like success.
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.