Citations by Oscar Wilde

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If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

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Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

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Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.

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Man has enough memory to remember hundreds of anecdotes, but not enough to remember who told them.

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Truth is a very complex thing, and politics is a very complex business. There are wheels within wheels. One may be under certain obligations to people that one must pay. Sooner or later in political life one has to compromise. Every one does.

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When you really want love you will find it waiting for you.

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He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; [...] Such things were impossible. It seemed monstrous even to think of them.

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A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.

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Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences, as in love, in the artist, it's simply the sense of beauty that manifests to the world his body and soul.

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Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.