Oscar Wilde Quotes
-
Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. Life makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.
-
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.
-
If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.
-
Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off...
-
Cats are put on earth to remind us that not everything has a purpose.
-
Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne.
-
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.
-
Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
-
Salomé, Salomé, dance for me. I pray thee dance for me. I am sad to-night. Yes, I am passing sad to-night. When I came hither I slipped in blood, which is an evil omen; and I heard, I am sure I heard in the air a beating of wings, a beating of giant wings. I cannot tell what they mean .... I am sad to-night. Therefore dance for me. Dance for me, Salomé, I beseech you. If you dance for me you may ask of me what you will, and I will give it you, even unto the half of my kingdom.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I have no objection to anyone's sex life as long as they don't practice it in the street and frighten the horses.
-
Never buy a thing you don't want merely because it is dear.
-
I am thoroughly sick of pearls. They make one look so plain, so good and so intellectual.
-
When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.
-
When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.
-
His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.
-
The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are very difficult to interpret (understand). Great passions are for the great of souls. Great events can only be seen by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.
-
What fire does not destroy, it hardens.
-
I am sorry my life is so marred and maimed by extravagance. But I cannot live otherwise. I, at any rate, pay the penalty of suffering.