Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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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When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.
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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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In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.
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My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.
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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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I have made an important discovery... that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effect of intoxication.
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I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me.
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Palermo was lovely. The most beautifully situated town in the world - it dreams away its life in the Conca d'Oro, the exquisite valley that lies between two seas. The lemon groves and the orange gardens were entirely perfect.
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Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.
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I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope.
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There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is!
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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 writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.
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The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
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If I hadn't believed it, then I wouldn't have seen it.
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Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.
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All art is at once surface and symbol.
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In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.... The Japanese people are ... simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.
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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?
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The mind of a the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
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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.
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Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.
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The best way to appreciate your job is to, is here to stay.