Oscar Wilde Quotes
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When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
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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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Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
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It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
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I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
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Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant.
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When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.
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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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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.
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A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
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Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
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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 summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
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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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Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.
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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.
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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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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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Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea.
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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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He is fond of being misunderstood. It gives him a post of vantage.
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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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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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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.