Oscar Wilde

Miscellaneous Aphorisms Oscar Wilde

The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. Women are made to be loved, not to be understood. It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. Moren than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read. Women, as someone says, love with their ears, just as men love with their eyes, if they ever love at all. It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly. Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion. Misfortunes one can endure, they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's faults-ah! there is the sting of life. Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity. Questions are never indiscreet; answers sometimes are. Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Anyone can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live: and unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.