Oscar Wilde Quotes - Page 7

Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.

If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.

Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.

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.

LADY BRACKNELL

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.

JACK: Yes, but said yourself that a severe chill was not hereditary.

ALGERNON: It usen't to be, I know - but I daresay it is now. Science is always making wonderful improvements in things.

So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable - any life.

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.

American novels, answered Lord Henry.

Si no podéis disfrutar leyendo un libro repetidas veces, de nada sirve leerlo ni una sola vez.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.