Oscar Wilde Quotes
-
Men of thoughts should have nothing to do with action.
-
I analyzed you, though you did not adore me.
-
If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.
-
Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
-
I love the French language... it's a delightful language, especially to curse with. It's like whopping your ass with silk.
-
Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand, For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee.
-
The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.
-
Art persists, it timelessly continues.
-
I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.
-
To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not - there is no weakness in that.
-
It is curious how vanity helps the successful man and wrecks the failure.
-
The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.
-
Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
-
I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.
-
There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.
-
The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.
-
I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.
-
Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.
-
Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.
-
Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.
-
I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful.
-
I am thoroughly sick of pearls. They make one look so plain, so good and so intellectual.
-
Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
-
You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.