Oscar Wilde Quotes
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It is only the sacred things that are worth touching.
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To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.
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I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.
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In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press.
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If it took Labouchere three columns to prove that I was forgotten, then there is no difference between fame and obscurity.
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I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
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In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.
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Men become old, but they never become good.
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We always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others.
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Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.
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Man is many things, but he is not rational.
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Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away.
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What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
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Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.
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To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.
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My friend is not allowed to go out today. I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life. They fill him with surprise. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine.
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Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not quite old enough to do that.
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To drift with every passion till my soulIs a stringed lute on which all winds can play, Is it for this that I have given away Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll Scrawled over on some boyish holiday With idle songs for pipe and virelay, Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
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Like two doomed ships that pass in storm we had crossed each other's way: but we made no sign, we said no word, we had no word to say.
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Now produce your explanation and pray make it improbable.
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The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
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Never met such a Gorgon . . . I don't really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair.
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To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
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But what world says that I'm wicked? It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.