Oscar Wilde Quotes
-
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.
-
He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.
-
Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne.
-
The weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun.
-
What fire does not destroy, it hardens.
-
Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.
-
But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself.
-
I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean.
-
California is an Italy without its art.
-
You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.
-
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.
-
The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.
-
I approve of any activity that requires the wearing of special clothing.
-
To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not - there is no weakness in that.
-
Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.
-
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.
-
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.
-
History is merely gossip.
-
Philosophy is like a normal personal organizer, but it's smaller than a matchbox.
-
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.
-
As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When I had to fill in my immigration papers, I gave my age as 19, and my profession as genius; I added that I had nothing to declare except my talent.