Oscar Wilde Quotes
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They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
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It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.
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Popularity is the only insult that has not yet been offered to Mr. Whistler.
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In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.
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Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.
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America is one long expectoration.
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Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.
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I appropriate what is already mine, for once a thing is published it becomes public property.
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I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.
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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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I wonder that no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes.
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The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.
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A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.
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Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.
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In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.
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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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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.
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We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.
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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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The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.
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It is art, and art only, that reveals us to ourselves.
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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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An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant as the case may be.
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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.