“For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow.”

Oscar Wilde

“It is not unbecoming for a man to seem like a child, in that he can recognize cynicism; only then will he understand the true nature of England.”

Oscar Wilde Recommended by Jimmy Jones.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

Oscar Wilde

“Every woman is a rebel, and usually in a wild revolt against herself.”

A Woman Of No Importance, Oscar Wilde

“I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.”

An Ideal Husband, Oscar Wilde

“For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is gray and black. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart.”

De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

“Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.”

De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

“To the true cynic nothing is ever revealed.”

De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.”

In conversation, Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Lady Windermere's Fan, Oscar Wilde

“Were we no better than chessmen, moved by an unseen power, vessels the potter fashions at his fancy, for honour or for shame? His reason revolted against it, and yet he felt that some tragedy was hanging over him, and that he had been suddenly called upon to bear an intolerable burden. Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to play parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, Oscar Wilde

“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”

on his deathbed, Oscar Wilde

“Put out the torches! Hide the moon! Hide the stars!”

Salomé, Oscar Wilde Recommended by beck.

“And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal.”

The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde

“Each man kills the thing he loves.”

The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde

“There is no sin except stupidity.”

The Critic As Artist, Oscar Wilde

“I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.”

The Importance Of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

“If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.”

The Importance Of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

“....There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion, and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that-perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims...”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“...and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“...how delightful other people's emotions were! - much more delightful than their ideas... One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends - those were the fascinating things in life.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.”

The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse the rhymes are, the most picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing... A new Hedonism--that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season... The moment I met you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be. There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such little time that your youth will last--such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde