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If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.

Oscar Wilde

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Oscar Wilde
Age: 46 †
Born: 1854
Born: October 16
Died: 1900
Died: November 30
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Oscar O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Teach
Irish
Talk
Sarcastic
Society
Civilized
Funny
Witty
Would
English
Travel
Listen
Quite
Civilised

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To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
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You can have your secret as long as I have your heart[.]
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If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.
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The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
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If people are dishonest once, they will be dishonest a second time. And honest people should keep away from them. (Lady Chiltern)
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One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.
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Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry.
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Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate.
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We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon werage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago.
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The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite with books my life would be livable -- any life.
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We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it
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What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise
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I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one's life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon's head, and one suffers, because it does not turn one to stone.
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The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.
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Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.
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If we're always guided by other people's thoughts, what's the point in having our own?
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Learn to differentiate between ignorance and stupidity.
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I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.
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What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true.
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We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in Art.
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