Oscar Wilde

"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."

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

"Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal."

"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody."

"Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole."

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

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."

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

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

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

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."

"Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy."

"Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams."

"One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable."

"It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us."

"The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream."

"His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion."

"I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss."