Oscar Wilde Quotes
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There is no Mystery so great as Misery.
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It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of the world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.
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All religious organizations exist to sell themselves to the rich.
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It is only very ugly or very beautiful women who ever hide their faces.
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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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When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.
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No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
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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.
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The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.
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So lets knock a couple back and make some noise.
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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.
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If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.
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All that we know who lie in gaol - Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long.
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Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.
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The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.
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One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one's hearers.
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The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.
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But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.
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Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.
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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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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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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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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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Perhaps one never seems so much at ones ease as when one has to play a part.