Oscar Wilde

"A flower blossoms for its own joy."

"Who, being loved, is poor?"

"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."

"Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary."

"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."

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

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

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

"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."

"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."

"To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

"I like men who have a future and women who have a past."

"Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different."

"No good deed goes unpunished."

"I have nothing to declare except my genius."

"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."

"When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it."

"The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true."

"It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon."