Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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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As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
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Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid.
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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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We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon werage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago.
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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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People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately.
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On refusing to make alterations to one of his plays: Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?
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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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I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips.
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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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It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.
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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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Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.
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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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People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.
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Beautiful things like beautiful sins belong to the rich.
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One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.
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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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We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.
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When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
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He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.
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Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne.
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In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.