Oscar Wilde Quotes

Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you.

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

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

If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

No gentleman ever has any money.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

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.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not?

A burnt child loves the fire.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.

Lady Hunstanton: But do you believe all that is written in the newspapers? Lord Illingworth: I do. Nowadays it is only the unreadable that occurs.