Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was a successful Irish playwright and author known for his wit. Intellectually he can be classified as a member of the aesthetic movement that championed the irrational and idiosyncratic against the rational and scientific.
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The god of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
Time is waste of money.
Industry is the root of all ugliness.
If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty.
The character of girls must depend upon their reading as much as upon the company they keep. Besides the intrinsic pleasure to be derived from solid knowledge, a woman ought to consider it as her best resource against poverty.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor.
Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man; real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul there are infinitely precious things that may not be taken from you. Try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you; and try, also, to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.