Oscar Wilde Quotes
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The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.
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Prism! Where is that baby?
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It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.
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Life is too short to learn German.
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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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He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.
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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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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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You are young. No hungry generations tread you down.... The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost...
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The true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything.
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The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away.
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Sphinxes without secrets.
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I have never killed anyone, but I have often read about some guy getting his ass taken out with great pleasure.
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The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.
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Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
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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.
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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 only thing worse than being misquoted is being sentenced to two years' hard labour for buggery.
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To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.
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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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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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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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The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.
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His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.