Oscar Wilde Quotes
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A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
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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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True contentment is not having everything, but in being satisfied with everything you have.
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I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it.
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Popularity is the only insult that has not yet been offered to Mr. Whistler.
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Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.
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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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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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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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The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.
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Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.
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Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.
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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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I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
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One must have some sort of occupation nowadays. If I hadn't my debts I shouldn't have anything to think about.
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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 every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.
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America is one long expectoration.
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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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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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To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.
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The birds did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.
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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 really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.