Oscar Wilde Quotes
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America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle.
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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 don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.
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If it is not nailed to the floor, it's mine. If I can pry it loose, it is not nailed down.
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Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.
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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.
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When I was young, I was no one. Now, I'm worldwilde.
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There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.
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I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean.
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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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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.
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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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What fire does not destroy, it hardens.
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There is only good art and mediocre art.
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The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.
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It is only very ugly or very beautiful women who ever hide their faces.
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There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.
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And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand, The hand that held the steel: For only blood can wipe out blood, And only tears can heal.
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I was disappointed in Niagara -- most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.
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No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.
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Intuition is a strange instinct that tells a woman she is right, whether she is or not.
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Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel.
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Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins.