Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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.
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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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She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.
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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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Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.
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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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No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
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California is an Italy without its art.
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Prism! Where is that baby?
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That is the mission of art - to make us pause and look at a thing a second time.
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There are few things easier than to live badly and die well.
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Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.
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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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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.
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Cats are put on earth to remind us that not everything has a purpose.
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There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstand, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous, and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.
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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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Salomé, Salomé, dance for me. I pray thee dance for me. I am sad to-night. Yes, I am passing sad to-night. When I came hither I slipped in blood, which is an evil omen; and I heard, I am sure I heard in the air a beating of wings, a beating of giant wings. I cannot tell what they mean .... I am sad to-night. Therefore dance for me. Dance for me, Salomé, I beseech you. If you dance for me you may ask of me what you will, and I will give it you, even unto the half of my kingdom.
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For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.
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The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.
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Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.
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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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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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You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.