Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb a the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.
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If I hadn't believed it, then I wouldn't have seen it.
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In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.
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Why, what a wonderful piece of luck! Here is a red rose! I have never seen any rose like it in all my life. It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name.
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All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.
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I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.
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I may have said the same thing before...but my explanation, I am sure, will always be different.
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Jack? . . . No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed. It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations . . . I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain. Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude. The only really safe name is Ernest.
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It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime.
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It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.
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By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.
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Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the center of the city.
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Just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising and lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweler.
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Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.
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The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.
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If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
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If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.
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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.
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I have made an important discovery... that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effect of intoxication.
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The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.
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You told me you had destroyed it. I was wrong. It has destroyed me.
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I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.
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There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.
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As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.