Oscar Wilde Reading Quotations

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

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

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

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.

You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.

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

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .

With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

What you read when you don't have to...

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.