Quotes from Oscar Wilde

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.

It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.

As the door closed behind them, the painter flung himself down on a sofa, and a look of pain came into his face.

There was evidently no time to be lost, so, hastily adopting the Fourth dimension of Space as a means of escape, he vanished through the wainscoting, and the house became quite quiet.

The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art.

Was there anything so real as words?

The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies.

We live in a world when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow.

Girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.

I have known everything, said Lord Henry, with a tired look in his eyes, but I am always ready for a new emotion.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.