Oscar Wilde Quotes
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You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. living, as you all do, on other and by them, you need at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season.
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I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.
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My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.
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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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The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.
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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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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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All art is at once surface and symbol.
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The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability.
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It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.
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A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.
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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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Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.
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She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
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Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.
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Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.
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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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The best people to work for are me, myself and I.
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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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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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I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope.
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George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.
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Misfortunes one can endure - they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults - Ah! there is the sting of life.
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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.