The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde Quotes

“It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter warders sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. I have had moments when I thought it would be wise to separate. Ah! Moments of weakness and madness! Now I see that would have mutilated my life, ruined my art, broken the musical chords which make a perfect soul. Even covered with mud I shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you. In my solitude you will be with me.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“My friend is not allowed to go out today. I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life. They fill him with surprise. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I love you, I love you, my heart is a rose which your love has brought to bloom, my life is a desert fanned by the delicious breeze of your breath, and whose cool spring are your eyes; the imprint of your little feet makes valleys of shade for me, the odour of your hair is like myrrh, and wherever you go you exhale the perfumes of the cassia tree.

Love me always, love me always. You have been the supreme, the perfect love of my life; there can be no other...”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“The weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I must remember that a good friend is a new world.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“From your silken hair to your delicate feet you are perfection to me. Pleasure hides love from us, but pain reveals it in its essence.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I see that any materialism in life coarsens the soul, and that the hunger of the body and the appetites of the flesh desecrate always, and often destroy.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“The unread is always better than the unreadable.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I have also learnt sympathy with suffering. To me, suffering seems now a sacramental thing, that makes those whom it touches holy.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I am sorry my life is so marred and maimed by extravagance. But I cannot live otherwise. I, at any rate, pay the penalty of suffering.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I wish i could write them down, these little coloured parables or poems that live for a moment in some cell of my brain, and then leave it to go wandering elsewhere. I hate writing; the mere act of writing a thing down is troublesome to me. I want some fine medium, and look for it in vain.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“They take their punishment so well, so cheerfully: I go out with an adder in my heart, and an asp in my tongue, and every night I sow thorns in the garden of my soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“The public is largely influenced by the look of a book. So are we all. It is the only artistic thing about the public.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I am getting rather astonishing in my Italian conversation. I believe I talk a mixture of Dante and the worst modern slang.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“Anything approaching an explanation is always derogatory to a work of art.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“He seems to read nothing but my books, and says his one desire is to 'follow in my footsteps'! But I have told him that they lead to terrible places.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I think after Christmas would be better for publication: I am hardly a Christmas present.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature Hell.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“artists have sex but art has none”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“I often wonder what would have happened to those in pain if, instead of Christ, there had been a Christian.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy…”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde