Some Wilde Quotes

I would like to thank my friend Jarrod Taylor for suggesting that I begin to read Oscar Wilde. I have only skimmed a compilation of what Oxford considers to be his greatest works and done a short online search, but have already come across a number of great quotes, a testament to his genius. Anyone who has coined as many catch phrases and what have become almost cliches has some serious business going on upstairs. Here are a handful of my favorites so far. If you have some others, let me know. I'm all over this kind of junk.

"Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard, and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.."

"...sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things...It
is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it,
and even then must bleed again, though not in pain."

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter."

"Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace."

"...every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and...therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day
to cry aloud on the housetop."

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

"Genius is born--not paid."

"Biography lends to death a new terror."

"Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event."
(Italics mine.)

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