Oscar Wilde Quotes
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You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing.
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I like looking at geniuses and listening to beautiful people.
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Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
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The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
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The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
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The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.
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Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
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Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
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Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.
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One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
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We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.
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The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart — hearts are made to be broken — but that it turns one’s heart to stone.
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Any place you love is the world to you.
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A mask tells us more than a face.
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Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
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Sometimes, the unnecessary is necessary.
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After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second glass you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.
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Good taste is the excuse I have given for leading such a bad life.
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Every woman is a rebel.
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I can believe anything as long as it is incredible.
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In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.
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Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.
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Things last either too long, or not long enough.
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The reason we are so pleased to find other people's secrets is that it distracts public attention from our own.