Oscar Wilde

The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

But we never get back our youth_ The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

Punctuality is the thief of time.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.

Time is a waste of money.

Punctuality is the thief of time

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good.

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

LADY BRACKNELLTo speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.

You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.