Oscar Wilde Quotes
-
A flower blossoms for its own joy.
-
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.
-
They are so pleased to find out other people's secrets. It distracts public attention from their own.
-
Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.
-
Most people are boring and stupid.
-
I don't like Switzerland; it has produced nothing but theologians and waiters.
-
The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. In some tiny ivory cell the brain stores the most delicate, and the most fleeting impressions.
-
There is only good art and mediocre art.
-
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.
-
If it is not nailed to the floor, it's mine. If I can pry it loose, it is not nailed down.
-
Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.
-
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?
-
I know. In fact, I am never wrong.
-
I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.
-
One pale woman all alone, The daylight kissing her wan hair, Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare, With lips of flame and heart of stone.
-
A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.
-
I find that forgiving one's enemies is a most curious morbid pleasure; perhaps I should check it.
-
...The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.
-
When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.
-
I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.
-
The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.
-
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.
-
Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
-
How else but through a broken heartMay Lord Christ enter in?