Oscar Wilde

“Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.”

“And down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet, Crept like a frightened girl.”

“Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.”

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.”

“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.”

“A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.”

“And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”

“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

“All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.”

“It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.”

“The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.”

“He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.”

“le mystère de l'amour est plus grand que le mystère de la mort.”

“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 tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”

“I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.”

“[On Bernard Shaw] An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him.”

“I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.”

“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.”

“It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.”

“Tell me, when you are alone with him [Max Beerbohm] Sphinx, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?”

“He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.”

“Psycholog­y is in its infancy, as a science. I hope in the interests of Art, it will always remain so.”

“I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lip.”

“Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.”

“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 warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.”

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”

“Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.”

“After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second glass you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”