Oscar Wilde Quotes
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I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
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To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.
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It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
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The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.
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Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
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I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
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When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
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I see that any materialism in life coarsens the soul, and that the hunger of the body and the appetites of the flesh desecrate always, and often destroy.
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All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
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If people were meant to be nude, they would have been born this way.
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I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.
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What is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.
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As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
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Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.
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The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.
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For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
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Alone, and without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
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Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true.
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The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret.
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It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
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She lives the poetry she cannot write.
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Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
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Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it.
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England has done one thing; it has invented and established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.