Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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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A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.
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I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.
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Now don't stir. I'll be back in five minutes. And don't fall into any temptations while I am away.
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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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It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.
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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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I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.
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A misanthrope I can understand - a womanthrope never.
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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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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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Life, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.
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If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
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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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Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterize modern thought, but Hamlet invented it.
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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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By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.
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He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.
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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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Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I? Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.