Oscar Wilde Quotes
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People who love only once in their lives are. . . shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.
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Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.
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Oh, no doubt the cod is a splendid swimmer - admirable for swimming purposes but not for eating.
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His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be.
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Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
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A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen.
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It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.
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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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Beauty is a form of Genius — is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.
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There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.
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You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all.
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It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.
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Before Turner there was no fog in London.
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I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.
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There is no such thing as a heterosexual male, only men who haven't met Oscar Wilde yet.
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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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I don't like Switzerland; it has produced nothing but theologians and waiters.
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I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.
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Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead.
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Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.
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One should never trust a woman who tells her real age. If she tells that, she'll tell anything.
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To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.
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In a temple everything should be serious except the thing that is being worshiped.
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When I see a spade, I call it a spade. I'm glad to say I have never seen a spade. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use it. It's the only thing he's fit for.