Oscar Wilde Quotes
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He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
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It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.
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We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
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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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The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them...
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Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills.
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There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.
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The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the consequence of its work but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also.
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If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.
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The recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.
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The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.
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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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With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?
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Punctuality is the thief of time.
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Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.
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It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.
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When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.
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The secret of life is in art.
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'The Lady's World' should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.
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Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
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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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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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Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before.
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Men become old, but they never become good.