Oscar Wilde

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

“As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls im...”

“The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grin...”

“What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry.”

“Nowadays, people read too many books to appreciate any.”

“Si no podéis disfrutar leyendo un libro repetidas veces, de nada sirve leerlo ni una sola vez.”

“Hayat başkalarının hatalarını yüklenemeyecek kadar kısaydı. Herkes kendi hayatını yaşıyor ve bu hayatı yaşamanın bedelini ödüyordu. Acı olansa, insanın çoğu zaman tek bir hata için çok fazla...”

“Are there not books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?”

“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”

“We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly ho...”

“The nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in trying to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate himself”

“In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism t...”

“The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upp...”

“A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”

“The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.”

“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”

“In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling...”

“I have a dining room done in different shades of white, with white cushions embroidered in yellow silk: the effect is absolutely delightful and the room beautiful.”

“The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.”

“Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch t...”