Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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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Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.
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I appropriate what is already mine, for once a thing is published it becomes public property.
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Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterize modern thought, but Hamlet invented it.
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But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.
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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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What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?
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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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By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.
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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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No gentleman ever has any money.
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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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When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.
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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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Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic — a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.
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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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When a golden girl can win Prayer from out the lips of sin, When the barren almond bears, And a little child gives away its tears, Then shall all the house be still And peace come to Canterville.
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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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Do you smoke? Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. I'm glad to hear of it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.
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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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Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.
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To define is to limit.
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On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.
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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?