"There might be some credit in being jolly."
Charles Dickens

"A cynic is a person who knows the prize of everything
and the value of nothing."
Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892)

"An excellent man: he has no enemies;
and none of his friends like him."
Osca Wilde, on George Bernard Shaw

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

"Ah, well, then I suppose I shall have to die
beyond my means."
Oscar Wilde, dying words

"Oscar Wilde's talent seems to me essentially rootless,
something growing in a glass in a little water."
George Moore

"All women become like their mothers.
That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his."
Oscar Wilde

"Biography lends to death a new terror."
Oscar Wilde

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable
that we have to alter it every six months."
Oscar Wilde

"I hope you have not been leading a double life,
pretending to be wicked and being really good
all the time." That would be hypocrisy.
Oscar Wilde

"Men marry because they are tired,
women because they are curious;
both are disappointed."
Oscar Wilde

"Music makes one feel so romantic - at least
it always gets on one's nerves - which
is the same thing nowadays."
Oscar Wilde

"Musical people always want one to be
perfectly dumb at the very moment when
one is longing to be perfectly deaf."
Oscar Wilde

"Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered.
I myself would say that it had merely been detected."
Oscar Wilde

"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything.
Except what is worth knowing.
Journalism, conscious of this, and having
tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands."
Oscar Wilde

"The youth of America is their oldest tradition.
It has been going on now for three hundred years."
Oscar Wilde (A Woman of No Importance, 1893)

"Always forgive your enemies;
nothing annoys them so much."
Oscar Wilde

"He leads his readers to the latrine
and locks them in."
Oscar Wilde, on George Moore

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

"Mr. Henry James writes fiction
as if it were a painful duty."
Oscar Wilde, on Henry James

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

"I think that God in creating man somewhat
overestimated his ability."
Oscar Wilde

"There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is
to dislike it, the other is to read Pope."
Oscar Wilde, on Alexander Pope

"When people agree with me
I always feel that I must be wrong."
Oscar Wilde

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