Oscar Wilde Quotes
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The security of Society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of Society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.
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Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything, and when they grow older they know it.
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There is nothing that art cannot express.
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Niagara Falls is simply a vast unnecessary amount of water going over the wrong way and then falling over unnecessary cliffs...The wonder would be if the water did not fall.
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But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself.
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Varnishing is the only artistic process with which Royal Academicians are thoroughly familiar.
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Life is too short to learn German.
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Lord Illingworth: Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
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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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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 criticism is a form of autobiography.
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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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He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.
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Anybody can sympathise with all the sufferings of the pal, nevertheless it involves an extremely great mother nature to sympathise by using a friend's achievement.
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The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.
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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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There is only good art and mediocre art.
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The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.
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All religious organizations exist to sell themselves to the rich.
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I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!
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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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In his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded....He stands apart, and the chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by, Philosophy will take note of him.
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Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.
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I approve of any activity that requires the wearing of special clothing.