Oscar Wilde Quotes
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I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss.
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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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The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.
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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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Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.
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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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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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By the artificial separation of soul and body men have invented a Realism that is vulgar and an Idealism that is void.
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I forget what killed it. I think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. That is always a dreadful moment. It fills one with the terror of eternity.
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The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.
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Misfortunes one can endure - they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults - Ah! there is the sting of life.
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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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He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.
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Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.
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Don't use big words. They mean so little.
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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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Oh, I love London society! It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what society should be.
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No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
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The moon in her chariot of pearl.
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I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception.
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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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Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne.
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I played with an idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air; transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox.
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Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid.