Oscar Wilde Quotes
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It is sweet to dance to violins When Love and Life are fair:To dance to flutes, to dance to lutesIs delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feeTo dance upon the air!
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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.
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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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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 That is exactly what things were originally made for.
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It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.
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It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it.
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Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
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It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.
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There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.
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Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow on another like the withered leaves of Autumn.
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The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.
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The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.
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Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.
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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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Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.
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It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
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He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone.
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...The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.
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A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
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Nature is a wet place where large numbers of ducks fly overhead uncooked.
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Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris.
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They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.
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I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
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When good Americans die, they go to Paris" "Where do bad Americans go?" "They stay in America.