Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex, multiform creature that bears within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh is tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.
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What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence.
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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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Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination.
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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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One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.
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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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A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.
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I don't like Switzerland; it has produced nothing but theologians and waiters.
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I won't belong to a club that accepts me as a member.
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Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window.
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An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.
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I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.
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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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The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not?
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Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices, there are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.
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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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Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties.
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As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.
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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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She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.
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There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other-by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.
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Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.
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Oh, why will parents always appear at the wrong time? Some extraordinary mistake in nature, I suppose.