Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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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Freedom, individualism and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.
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Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.
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My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.
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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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To define is to limit.
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Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.
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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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Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.
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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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Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.
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How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it was only the other way! If it was I who were to be always young, and the picture that were to grow old! For this — for this — I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give!
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There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.
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It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.
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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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When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.
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Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.
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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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Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the center of the city.
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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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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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If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.
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All art is at once surface and symbol.
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Set in this stormy Northern sea, Queen of these restless fields of tide, England! what shall men say of thee, Before whose feet the worlds divide?