Oscar Wilde

“Be­cause to in­flu­ence a per­son is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his nat­ural thoughts, or burn with his nat­ural pas­sions. His vir­tues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are bor­rowed. He be­comes an echo of someone else’s mu­sic, an actor of a part that has not been writ­ten for him.

Al­gernon

I hope to­mor­row will be a fine day, Lane.

Lane

It never is, sir.

Al­gernon

Lane, you’re a per­fect pess­im­ist.

"Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death's house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is."

"They mean," he said, sadly, "that you must weep with me for my sins, because I have no tears, and pray with me for my soul, because I have no faith, and then, if you have always been sweet, and good, and gentle, the angel of death will have mercy on me. You will see fearful shapes in darkness, and wicked voices will whisper in your ear, but they will not harm you, for against the purity of a little child the powers of Hell cannot prevail."

it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive

All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of

Finally, let me say this—the æsthetic movement produced certain curious colours, subtle in their loveliness and fascinating in their almost mystical tone. They were, and are, our reaction against the crude primaries of a doubtless more respectable but certainly less cultivated age. My story is an essay on decorative art. It reacts against the crude brutality of plain realism. It is poisonous if you like, but you cannot deny that it is also perfect, and perfection is what we artists aim at.—I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, OSCAR WILDE

I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emo­tions. I want to use them, to en­joy them, and to dom­in­ate them.

Every im­pulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and pois­ons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for ac­tion is a mode of puri­fic­a­tion. Noth­ing re­mains then but the re­col­lec­tion of a pleas­ure, or the lux­ury of a re­gret. The only way to get rid of a tempta­tion is to yield to it. Res­ist it, and your soul grows sick with long­ing for the things it has for­bid­den to it­self, with de­sire for what its mon­strous laws have made mon­strous and un­law­ful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

what is joy to me, to him is pain.