Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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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In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.
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Fruitcake is like semen, there's a lot of it about but no one wants to swallow it.
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She is a peacock in everything but beauty.
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When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.
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The job of the critic is to report to us his moods.
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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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This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
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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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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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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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Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.
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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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Punctuality is the thief of time.
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The English public always feels perfectly at ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.
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Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.
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If England treats her criminals the way she has treated me, she doesn't deserve to have any.
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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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The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.
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Music is the art... which most completely realizes the artistic idea and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.
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In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.
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I am Irish by race but the English have condemned me to talk the language of Shakespeare.
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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.
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America is one long expectoration.