Oscar Wilde Quotes
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I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.
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The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life.
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With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?
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Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.
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Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.
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And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
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Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.
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For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us.
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Whatever harsh criticisms may be passed on the construction of her sentences, she at least possesses that one touch of vulgarity that makes the whole world kin.
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But whether I become a believer or remain an agnostic, my belief or disbelief must derive its source from within, not from without. I, myself, must create its symbols. The transcendental is that which produces its own form. I will never discover its secret if I do not find it in my own heart; if I do not possess it already I shall never be able to acquire it.
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I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.
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The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
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There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America. It was not until I had seen the water-works at Chicago that I realised the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautiful rhythmic thing I have ever seen.
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Ah, well, then I suppose I shall have to die beyond my means.
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Now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.
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Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.
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Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world's tongue.
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They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
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The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.
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The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
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There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other-by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.
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If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.
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Music is the perfect type of art.
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The best way to appreciate your job is to, is here to stay.