Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
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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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Cleverness becomes a public nuisance.
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I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips.
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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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Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined.
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An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.
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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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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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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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It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.
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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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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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It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.
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Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.
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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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Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.
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He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.
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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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Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne.
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Beautiful things like beautiful sins belong to the rich.
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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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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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I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss.