Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there are hope.

But whether I become a believer or remain an agnostic, my belief or disbelief must derive its source from within, not from without. I, myself, must create its symbols. The transcendental is that which produces its own form. I will never discover its secret if I do not find it in my own heart; if I do not possess it already I shall never be able to acquire it.

I don't think I am heartless. Do you?' 'You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian,' answered Lord Henry with his sweet melancholy smile.

It is perfectly monstrous, he said, at last, the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.

One cannot always keep an adder in one's breast to feed one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one's soul.

Ah! ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me? If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death.

I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions—that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were.

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.

In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?

We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man - that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.