Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.
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There are few things easier than to live badly and die well.
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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.
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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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I have no objection to anyone's sex life as long as they don't practice it in the street and frighten the horses.
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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 am thoroughly sick of pearls. They make one look so plain, so good and so intellectual.
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The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.
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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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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 growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.
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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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It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.
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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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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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Prism! Where is that baby?
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It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
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Every thing to be true must become a religion.
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Veni vidi veni iterum! I came, I saw, I came again!
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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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Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. The past, the present and the future are but one moment in the sight of God, in whose sight we should try to live. Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought. The imagination can transcend them.
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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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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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The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die.