Quotes from Oscar Wilde

I am covered with fine gold, said the Prince, you must take it off, leaf by leaf, and give it to my poor.

For myself, the only immortality I desire is to invent a new sauce.

Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids.  I consider it morbid.  Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. 

Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives.

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.

When the prurient and the impotent attack you, be sure you are right.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.

There are only two ways, as you know, of becoming civilized. One is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt.

By the way, is there any difference between 'grey' and 'gray'? I believe there is, but I don't know what it is. In one place in the poem Smithers suggests 'gray'. In others he leaves 'grey'. Perhaps he is seeing red. I believe they are sympathetic colours in spectroscope investigations.

For lo, what changes time can bring! The cycles of revolving years May free my heart from all its fears, And teach my lips a song to sing. Before yon field of trembling gold Is garnered into dusty sheaves, Or ere the autumn's scarlet leaves Flutter as birds adown the wold, I may have run the glorious race, And caught the torch while yet aflame, And called upon the holy name Of Him who now doth hide His face. ARONA.

He who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.

To live in happiness, you must know some unhappiness in life.