Quotes from Oscar Wilde

ravelled skeins of glossy white silk, were drifting across the hollowed turquoise of the summer sky.

I wrote when I did not know life. Now that I know life, I have no more to write.

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.

The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it. Women

I wish I could love," cried Dorian Gray with a deep note of pathos in his voice. "But I seem to have lost the passion and forgotten the desire. I am too much concentrated on myself. My own personality has become a burden to me.

Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves?

People are fond of giving away what they need most themselves.

are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Appearance is, in fact, a matter of effect merely, and it is with the effects of nature that you have to deal, not with the real condition of the object.

But there is no such thing, sir, as a ghost, and I guess the laws of Nature are not going to be suspended for the British aristocracy

One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends—those were the fascinating things in life.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us.