Oscar Wilde Quotes
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It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country.
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If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.
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It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.
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This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.
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What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.
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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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If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.
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The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.
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I have put my talent into writing, my genius I have saved for living.
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The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely any one at all escapes.
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With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.
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There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.
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I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice.
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Beauty is a form of Genius — is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.
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Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.
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Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success.
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I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
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It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it.
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If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself - a rare type in our time ... you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days. But Oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next to a man who has spent his life in trying to educate others! What a dreadful experience that is!
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One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
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Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things. That is exactly what things were originally made for.
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If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.
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And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of Spring, And the rose-bud breaks into pink on the climbing briar, And the crocus-bed is a quivering moon of fire Girdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring.
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Every one of course represents the spirit of his age, but there is an eternal aspect of the Spirit of every age which may be caught. To recreate the past from the mutilated fragments of the present is the task of the Historian.