Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Popularity is the only insult that has not yet been offered to Mr. Whistler.
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Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.
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I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
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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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Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.
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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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The Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.
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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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There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.
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And, as for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes.
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The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
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Liberty is the chosen resort of the artistic shopper.
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All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.
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Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.
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True contentment is not having everything, but in being satisfied with everything you have.
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Nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know good in anything until you have torn the heart out of it by excess.
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Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.
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Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.
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I didn't say I liked it Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.
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We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
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And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand.
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We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone.
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Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, Destiny never closed her accounts.
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Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.