Oscar Wilde Quotes
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She is a peacock in everything but beauty.
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Cleverness becomes a public nuisance.
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Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.
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To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.
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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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I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.
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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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She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
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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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Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.
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In fact, now you mention the subject, I have been very bad in my own small way. I don't think you should be so proud of that, though I am sure it must have been very pleasant.
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When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.
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I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.
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Philanthropy has become simply the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures.
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The best people to work for are me, myself and I.
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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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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?
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There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
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Civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.
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The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.
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Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you.
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Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleance me in the great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
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The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability.
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George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.