Oscar Wilde: The Complete Collection [contains links to free audiobooks] (The Picture Of Dorian Gray + Lady Windermere’s Fan + The Importance of Being ... Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and many more!)

by Oscar Wilde

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.

I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.

Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.

Rise, sir, from this semi-recumbent posture. It is most indecorous.

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair….

My dear boy, I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all.

Algernon. I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious.

Cecily. [Coming over very slowly.] But I don’t like German. It isn’t at all a becoming language. I know perfectly well that I look quite plain after my German lesson.

Cecily. [Picks up books and throws them back on table.] Horrid Political Economy! Horrid Geography! Horrid, horrid German!

Algernon. If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.

If it was my business, I wouldn’t talk about it. [Begins to eat muffins.] It is very vulgar to talk about one’s business. Only people like stock-brokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties.

Cecily. They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.

Cannot repentance wipe out an act of folly?

Look at the moon! How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. You would fancy she was looking for dead things.

Where is he whose cup of abominations is now full? Where is he, who in a robe of silver shall one day die in the face of all the people?

Salomé. It is his eyes above all that are terrible. They are like black holes burned by torches in a Tyrian tapestry. They are like black caverns where dragons dwell. They are like the black caverns of Egypt in which the dragons make their lairs. They are like black lakes troubled by fantastic moons…. Do you think he will speak again?

I hear in the palace the beating of the wings of the angel of death.

I have a right to share in Sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world, and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God’s secret as anyone can get.

Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern Art.

I have said that behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. It were still wiser to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul.

The danger was half the excitement.

Voilà où mènent les mauvais chemins!

Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will, but to Hamlet madness is a mere mask for the hiding of weakness.

I am to be released, if all goes well with me, towards the end of May, and hope to go at once to some little seaside village abroad with Robbie and More Adey. The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigenia, washes away the stains and wounds of the world. Θάλασσα χλύζει πάντα τ’ανθρώπων κακά.

I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the Sea,

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude.

the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.