Oscar Wilde Quotes
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When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting.
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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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A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.
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The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
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After a good quality dinner one will be able to forgive anybody, still one's own relations.
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His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
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Ah, well, then I suppose I shall have to die beyond my means.
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Fashion rests upon folly. Art rests upon law. Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. Indeed what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months! It is quite clear that were it beautiful and rational we would not alter anything that combined those two rare qualities. And wherever dress has been so, it has remained unchanged in law and principle for many hundred years.
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Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
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When I went to America I had two secretaries, one for autographs, one for locks of hair. Within six months the one had died of writer's cramp, the other was completely bald.
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What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.
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A man who takes himself too seriously will find that no one else takes him seriously.
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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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Oh, why will parents always appear at the wrong time? Some extraordinary mistake in nature, I suppose.
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Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid. Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.
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Fool, nothing is impossible in Russia but reform.
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I didn't have a life until I went up onstage.
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I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips.
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It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.
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Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.
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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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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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An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
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For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us.