Oscar Wilde Quotes
-
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.
-
It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
-
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.
-
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
-
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
-
A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.
-
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.
-
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
-
Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris.
-
Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.
-
I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.
-
I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
-
An idea that isn't risky is hardly worth calling an idea.
-
Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant.
-
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.
-
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
-
When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.
-
I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
-
There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims...
-
Oh, how I vainly wished to the bearded man in the sky that I was Neapolitan. Why? So I could bring in a fine Neapolitan pest control to help with Queensberry's problem before it gets out of hand.
-
It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it.
-
He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone.
-
When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
-
I know not whether Laws be right,Or whether Laws be wrong;All that we know who lie in gaolIs that the wall is strong;And that each day is like a year,A year whose days are long.