Quotes from Oscar Wilde

What does money matter? Love is more than money.

But, to the philosopher, my dear Gerald, women represent the triumph of matter over mind - just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

It is a very ungentlemanly thing to read a private cigarette case. Algernon.  Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't.  More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read. Jack.  I am quite aware of the fact, and I don't propose to discuss modern culture.  It isn't the sort of thing one should talk of in private. 

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.  Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! Jack.  That wouldn't be at all a bad thing. Algernon.  Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow.  Don't try it.  You should leave that to people who haven't been at a University.  They do it so well in the daily papers. 

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves.

But the happiness of a married man, my dear Gerald, depends on the people he has not married.

The great events of the world take place in the Brain. It is in the Brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.

But you will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of ours. Of course he does. I, of all men, am not going to deny that. But remember that there has never been an artistic age, or an artistic people since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an exquisite exception.

A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be.  That is his punishment.  Those who want a mask have to wear it.