Oscar Wilde Quotes
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You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far.
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Don't use big words. They mean so little.
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Ah, well, then I suppose I shall have to die beyond my means.
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A man who takes himself too seriously will find that no one else takes him seriously.
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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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It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country.
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Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
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The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.
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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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You know what a woman's curiosity is.
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Ah! happy day they whose hearts can break And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his plan And cleanse his soul from Sin? How else but through a broken heart May Lord Christ enter in?
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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 such thing as a heterosexual male, only men who haven't met Oscar Wilde yet.
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Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
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I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
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Fool, nothing is impossible in Russia but reform.
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Before Turner there was no fog in London.
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Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all.
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It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.
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If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.
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There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm.
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As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.
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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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Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.