Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. The past, the present and the future are but one moment in the sight of God, in whose sight we should try to live. Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought. The imagination can transcend them.
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Chrysanthemums from gilded argosy Unload their gaudy senseless merchandise.
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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.
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I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean.
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If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.
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God is love, love is blind, Stevie Wonder is blind, therefore Stevie Wonder is God.
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He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should always be here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in the summer when we want something to chill our intelligence.
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Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate.
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Industry is the root of all ugliness.
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I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.
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I don't mind plain women being puritans. It is the only excuse they have for being plain.
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I find that forgiving one's enemies is a most curious morbid pleasure; perhaps I should check it.
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My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.
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Men of thoughts should have nothing to do with action.
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The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical.
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On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.
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A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.
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Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented.
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The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.
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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.
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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.
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I am thoroughly sick of pearls. They make one look so plain, so good and so intellectual.
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It is curious how vanity helps the successful man and wrecks the failure.
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I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.