Oscar Wilde Quotes
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There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.
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Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We woman have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man's last romance.
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All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.
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One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
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Circumstances should never alter principles!
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Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.
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The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.
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Pleasures may turn a heart to stone, riches may make it callous, but sorrows cannot break it. Hearts live by being wounded.
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I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.
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Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
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Imitation is the homage mediocrity pays to greatness.
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Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One must eat muffins quite calmly, it is the only way to eat them.
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To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
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Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.
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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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Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
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Loveless marriages are horrible. But there is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage. A marriage in which there is love, but on one side only; faith, but on one side only; devotion, but on one side only, and in which of the two hearts one is sure to be broken.
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One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
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Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old.
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And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,None knew so well as I:For he who lives more lives than oneMore deaths than one must die.
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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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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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The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.
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My dear fellow, the truth isn't quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl.