Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Quotes

• Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.

• True friends stab you in the front.

• Life is one fool thing after another where as love is two fool things after each other.

• Woman are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

• Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

• Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.

• When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

• We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

• Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

• Those whom the gods love grow young.

• But what is the difference between literature and journalism? Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.

• We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.

• As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have its fascinations. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

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

• Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.

• Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

• It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But it is better to be good than to be ugly.

• Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man�s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

• To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.

• America is the first country to have gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual intervening period of civilization.