Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.

You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves. By each let his be heard. Some do it with a bitter look. Some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss. The brave man with a sword!

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.

Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.

Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends up blocking his retreat.

With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?

Who, being loved, is poor?

While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first is personality, which no one should copy; the second is perfection, which all should aim at.

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

When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

When people agree I always feel that I must be wrong.

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 try their luck men risk theirs.

What a man really has is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.

We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

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. All art is quite useless.

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

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

True friends stab you in the front.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.