Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
— Oscar Wilde
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.
The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
When good Americans die they go to Paris.
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
Those whom the gods love grow young.
There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
All art is quite useless.
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
It is always the unreadable that occurs.
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.
I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
