"The Disciple" - Oscar Wilde

"When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort.

And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said, 'We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.'

'But was Narcissus beautiful?' said the pool.

'Who should know that better than you?' answered the Oreads. 'Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.'

And the pool answered, 'But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.'" ~ Oscar Wilde

"People are suns, not moons." ~ Oscar Wilde

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." ~ Oscar Wilde

"The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast." ~ Oscar Wilde

 "Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are." ~ Oscar Wilde

"Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both." ~ Oscar Wilde

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." ~ Oscar Wilde

"I have nothing to declare except my genuis." ~ Oscar Wilde

 

"Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth." ~ Oscar Wilde

"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same." ~ Oscar Wilde

"Everything popular is wrong." ~ Oscar Wilde

"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." ~ Oscar Wilde

 

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between." ~ Oscar Wilde

"A true friend stabs you in the front." ~ Oscar Wilde

"I am not young enough to know everything." ~ Oscar Wilde 

"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." ~ Oscar Wilde

"All art is quite useless." ~ Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

• "But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face."

• "You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know."

• "Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different."

• "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

• "Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot."

• "What of art? - It is a malady; Love? - An illusion; Religion - The fashionable substitute for Belief."

• "To define is to limit."

• "A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her."

• "When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife."

• "Women love with their ears, men love with their eyes."

• "Peace gives life."

• "Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that."

• "The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty."

• "Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one."

• "All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime."

• "If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart."

• "The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of Faith and the lesson of Romance."

• "But a chance tone of colour in a room or in a morning sky, a particular perfume that you have once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you have come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play - I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend."

"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best." ~ Oscar Wilde

"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." ~ Oscar Wilde