Oscar Wilde Quotes
-
The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.
-
Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
-
The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.
-
Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.
-
In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.
-
Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.
-
History is a lie commonly agreed upon.
-
The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone - for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.
-
Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.
-
You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.
-
All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
-
The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.
-
Only love can keep anyone alive...
-
Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failures.
-
I wrote when I did not know life; now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no more to write. Life cannot be written; life can only be lived.
-
When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.
-
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
-
Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.
-
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
-
Psychology is in its infancy, as a science. I hope in the interests of Art, it will always remain so.
-
Only good questions deserve good answers.
-
I have never learned anything except from people younger than myself.
-
One can live for years sometimes without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into one single hour.
-
George Moore leads his readers to the latrine and locks them in.