Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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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Veni vidi veni iterum! I came, I saw, I came again!
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God grant me the serenity to accept that people are ignorant, the courage to uphold the law when I'm hostile, & the wisdom to realize that murder is illegal.
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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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It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.
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An egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different.
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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 problem with the common person is that he is so unbearably common!
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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 moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.
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Whenever I'm in doubt, I ask myself, 'What would Jesus do?' And then I realize, Jesus got crucified, so maybe his decision-making isn't all that great.
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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 only thing worse than being misquoted is being sentenced to two years' hard labour for buggery.
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The only sin is stupidity.
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Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
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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 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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In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
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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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Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.
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A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.
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Imagination is imitative-the real innovation lies in criticism.
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A truly good woman comes in only two types: One who knows nothing and the other who knows everything.
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The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.