Oscar Wilde Quotes
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The world seemed to me fine because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived.
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The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.
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A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
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Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.
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I beg your pardon I didn't recognise you - I've changed a lot.
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Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.
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The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.
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I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one's life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon's head, and one suffers, because it does not turn one to stone.
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Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
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The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind.
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Full frontal nudity is reserved for Adam and Eve!
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Women are made to be loved, not understood.
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Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.
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The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
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A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
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To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.
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Youth is the only thing worth having.
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It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.
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The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.
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Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid, but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.
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If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.
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The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
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Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
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It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.