Oscar Wilde Quotes
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In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press.
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The only real people are the people who never existed.
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Freedom, individualism and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.
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What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.
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When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.
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True contentment is not having everything, but in being satisfied with everything you have.
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Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature it requires, in fact, that nature of a true Individualist to sympathize with a friend's success.
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The ability of the theist to misunderstand a thing is directly proportional to the obviousness of the thing.
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It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.
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It is always painful fo part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.
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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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Lord Caversham: No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex.Lord Goring: Quite so. And we men are so self-sacrificing that we never use it, do we, father?
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Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.
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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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When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.
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In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.
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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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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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She is a peacock in everything but beauty.
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The English public always feels perfectly at ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.
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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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The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.
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Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail 'round the high-pooped galleys... Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad's head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be.
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That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance.