Oscar Wilde

To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.

Even things that are true can be proved.

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.

I am very pleased you like my stories. They are studies in prose, put for Romance's sake into fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find simplicity in a subtle strangeness.

One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.

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

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

It was always once springtime in my heart.

Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.

tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play_ I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one__ tears.

If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

It is he who has broken the bond of marriage - not I. I only break its bondage.

Lady Windermere: Windermere and I married for love.Duchess of Berwick: Yes, we begin like that. It was only Berwick's brutal and incessant threats of suicide that made me accept him at all, and before the year was out, he was running after all kinds of petticoats, every colour, every shape, every material.

Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that?I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.