Oscar Wilde Quotes
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I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.
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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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No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
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When good Americans die, they go to Paris" "Where do bad Americans go?" "They stay in America.
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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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The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.
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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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Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.
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Women have become so highly educated... that nothing should surprise us nowadays, except happy marriages.
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Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever written in my life. Strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?
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Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.
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Like strange mechanical grotesques, Making fantastic arabesques, The shadows raced across the blind.
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The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
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Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.
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I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.
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Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne.
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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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He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.
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You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all.
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Whatever harsh criticisms may be passed on the construction of her sentences, she at least possesses that one touch of vulgarity that makes the whole world kin.
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Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.
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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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I won't belong to a club that accepts me as a member.
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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.