Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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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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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A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.
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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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Beautiful things like beautiful sins belong to the rich.
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The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.
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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 problem with the common person is that he is so unbearably common!
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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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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 moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.
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Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne.
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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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It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.
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A sentimentalist—is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.
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People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.
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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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Niagara Falls is simply a vast unnecessary amount of water going over the wrong way and then falling over unnecessary cliffs...The wonder would be if the water did not fall.
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Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
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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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I believe it is customary in good society to take some slight refreshment at five o'clock.
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Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
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You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.