Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Perhaps one never seems so much at ones ease as when one has to play a part.
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In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself.
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But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.
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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.
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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.
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Never buy a thing you don't want merely because it is dear.
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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.
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The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.
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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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History is merely gossip.
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One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one's hearers.
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A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.
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At six o'clock we cleaned our cells, At seven all was still, But the sough and swing of a mighty wing The prison seemed to fill, For the Lord of Death with icy breath Had entered in to kill.
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In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
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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.
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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.
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Every woman is wrong until she cries.
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There is no Mystery so great as Misery.
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Friendship never forgets. That is the wonderful thing about it.
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Sphinxes without secrets.
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I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
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The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away.
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The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. In some tiny ivory cell the brain stores the most delicate, and the most fleeting impressions.
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She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.