Oscar Wilde Quotes
-
The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.
-
I wonder that no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes.
-
Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.
-
The American father is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher.
-
I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.
-
To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.
-
If England treats her criminals the way she has treated me, she doesn't deserve to have any.
-
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.
-
In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.
-
Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.
-
The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed.
-
They afterwards took me to a dancing saloon where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice- 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'
-
It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
-
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
-
Music is the art... which most completely realizes the artistic idea and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.
-
Writing bores me so.
-
In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.
-
The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life.
-
It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.
-
I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
-
I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.
-
This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
-
Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art.
-
Life, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.