Jimmy's Reviews > Oscar Wilde's Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations

Some examples:

Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life.

I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.

Life cannot be written. Life can only be lived.

People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately.

It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious.

I like men who have a future and women who have a past.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

He hasn't a single redeeming vice.

I can resist everything except temptation.

Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.

It is the confession, not the priest that gives us absolution.

Most religious teachers spend their time trying to prove the unproven by the unprovable.

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

No great artist sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist.

The only portraits in which one believes are portraits where there is very little of the sitter and a very great deal of the artist.

Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

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

I hate people who talk about themselves, as you do, when one wants to talk about oneself, as I do.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.