Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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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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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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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What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?
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Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.
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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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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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There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured.
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It is a pity to make a mystery out of what should most easily be understood. There is nothing occult about the thought that all things maybe made well or made ill. A work of art is a well-made thing - that is all. It may be a well-made statue of a well-made chair or a well-made book. Art is not a special sauce applied to ordinary cooking; it is the cooking itself that is good. Most simply and generally, Art may be thought of as "The Well Doing of What Needs Doing."
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Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art.
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You told me you had destroyed it. I was wrong. It has destroyed me.
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What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence.
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Lawyers have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent.
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Don't feed the trolls; nothing fuels them so much.
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Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons.
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He hadn’t a single redeeming vice.
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Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.
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You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid.
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It is always worth while asking a question, though it is not always worth while answering one.
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As for modern Journalism, its not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.
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If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.
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To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.
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They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.
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That quite does for me. I haven't a word to say... Too much care was taken with our education, I am afraid. To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one out from so much.