"The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature."

Wilde, Oscar on psychoanalysis   

"People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect -- simply a confession of failures."

Wilde, Oscar on fidelity
11 fans of this quote   

"The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public."

Wilde, Oscar on flirting
3 fans of this quote   

"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."

Wilde, Oscar on food and eating
11 fans of this quote   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"Always forgive your enemies -- nothing annoys them so much."

Wilde, Oscar on forgiveness
51 fans of this quote   

"We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely."

Wilde, Oscar on function
5 fans of this quote   

"A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude."

Wilde, Oscar on gentlemen
24 fans of this quote   

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

Wilde, Oscar on america
10 fans of this quote   

"The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years."

Wilde, Oscar on america
4 fans of this quote   

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

Wilde, Oscar on goals
22 fans of this quote   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism."

Wilde, Oscar on goodness
15 fans of this quote   

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."

Wilde, Oscar on happiness
27 fans of this quote   

"How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say."

Wilde, Oscar on hypocrisy
23 fans of this quote   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands."

Wilde, Oscar on jealousy
6 fans of this quote   

"I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do."

Wilde, Oscar on moralists
3 fans of this quote   

"Lord Illingworth: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. Mrs. Allonby: No man does. That is his."

Wilde, Oscar on mothers   

"Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives."

Wilde, Oscar on motives
8 fans of this quote   

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

Wilde, Oscar on painters and painting   

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

Wilde, Oscar on fashion
26 fans of this quote   

"And now, I am dying beyond my means. [Sipping champagne on his deathbed]"

Wilde, Oscar on famous last words
8 fans of this quote   

"One should always play fair when one has the winning cards."

Wilde, Oscar on gambling
7 fans of this quote   

"As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection."

Wilde, Oscar on lies and lying   

"An ordinary man away from home giving advice."

Wilde, Oscar on experts
7 fans of this quote   

"The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on eloquence
14 fans of this quote   

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on education
18 fans of this quote   

"I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on education
10 fans of this quote   

"We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on age and aging
15 fans of this quote   

"Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine"

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on adversity
64 fans of this quote   

"If power is for sale, sell your mother to buy it. You can always buy her back again."

Proverb, Arabian on power   

"I have never developed indigestion from eating my words."

Churchill, Winston on words
10 fans of this quote   

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on enthusiasm
37 fans of this quote   

"Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects."

Carlyle, Thomas on eyes
4 fans of this quote   

"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."

Wilde, Oscar on faces
26 fans of this quote   

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

Wilde, Oscar on excellence
34 fans of this quote   

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."

Wilde, Oscar on education
39 fans of this quote   

"A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."

Wilde, Oscar on enemies
15 fans of this quote   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness."

Wilde, Oscar on dullness
15 fans of this quote   

"One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art."

Wilde, Oscar on dress
24 fans of this quote   

"Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."

Wilde, Oscar on democracy
23 fans of this quote   

"You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don't let yourself indulge in vain wishes."

Tagore, Rabindranath on adventure
16 fans of this quote