Oscar Wilde Quotes
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There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
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My dear fellow, the truth isn't quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl.
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People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.
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But I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
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Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all you must not strip it of vitality. You must find it in life and re-create it in art.
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I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
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A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude.
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Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.
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He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.
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Everything that is popular is wrong.
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Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.
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The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.
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Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
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It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.
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Circumstances should never alter principles!
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It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
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There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.
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No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.
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Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.
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Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.