Oscar Wilde Quotes
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All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.
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Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.
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Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
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And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.
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Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
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We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, that fire can purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all.
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My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.
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Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
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Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate.
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I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
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We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
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Life under a good government is rarely dramatic; life under a bad government is always so.
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Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.
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A burnt child loves the fire.
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I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
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It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.
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If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. but if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would move back again and again and beg to be admitted so that I might share in what I was entitled to share. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation.
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When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.
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Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
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My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter warders sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. I have had moments when I thought it would be wise to separate. Ah! Moments of weakness and madness! Now I see that would have mutilated my life, ruined my art, broken the musical chords which make a perfect soul. Even covered with mud I shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you. In my solitude you will be with me.
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The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.
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Only love can keep anyone alive...
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An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.
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A beggar hates his benefactor as much as he hates himself for begging.