Oscar Wilde Quotes
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While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy.
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He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.
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I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.
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There is a tiny yellow daffodil, The butterfly can see it from afar, Although one summer evening's dew could fill Its little cup twice over, ere the star Had called the lazy shepherd to his fold, And be no prodigal.
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For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.
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I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean.
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Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.
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Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.
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It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.
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Give children beauty, not the record of bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls, as they call history, or of the latitude and longitude of places nobody cares to visit, as they call geography.
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Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the dullness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange snakespotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud's building in the College of St. John.
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She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.
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All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.
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Cats are put on earth to remind us that not everything has a purpose.
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Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.
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No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
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Philosophy is like a normal personal organizer, but it's smaller than a matchbox.
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Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.
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There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.
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Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
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When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.
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It is only very ugly or very beautiful women who ever hide their faces.
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Never buy a thing you don't want merely because it is dear.
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I approve of any activity that requires the wearing of special clothing.