Oscar Wilde Quotes
-
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
-
Surely Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds, and dearer than fine opals. Pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the marketplace. It may not be purchased of the merchants, for can it be weighed out in the balance for gold.
-
Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.
-
There are few things easier than to live badly and die well.
-
They are so pleased to find out other people's secrets. It distracts public attention from their own.
-
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.
-
How else but through a broken heartMay Lord Christ enter in?
-
A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.
-
Prism! Where is that baby?
-
The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.
-
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
-
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.
-
Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.
-
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.
-
It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world.
-
My dear young lady, there was a great deal of truth; I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important.
-
A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.
-
Veni vidi veni iterum! I came, I saw, I came again!
-
The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.
-
I don't want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that, and I never pay mine.
-
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.
-
Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.
-
I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of someone older than yourself. That is always a dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit, you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.
-
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.