Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.
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I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.
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Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.
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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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A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.
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Varnishing is the only artistic process with which Royal Academicians are thoroughly familiar.
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We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim - objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.
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The problem with the common person is that he is so unbearably common!
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They are so pleased to find out other people's secrets. It distracts public attention from their own.
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Tell me, when you are alone with him Max Beerbohm Sphinx, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?
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Prism! Where is that baby?
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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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Philosophy is like a normal personal organizer, but it's smaller than a matchbox.
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I approve of any activity that requires the wearing of special clothing.
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The weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun.
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The people who have adored me — there have not been very many, but there have been some — have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.
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However, I think anything is better than high intellectual pressure. That is the most unbecoming thing there is. It makes the noses of the young girls so particularly large.
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The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.
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Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.
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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.
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To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
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The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.
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The beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance . . . living on the memory of crushing defeats.
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The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.