Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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.
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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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I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart.
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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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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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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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Yes, I am a thorough republican. No other form of government is so favorable to the growth of art. ...because of the importance it places on the individual, their liberty, self-expression, creativity, and personal responsibility.
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If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
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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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It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.
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Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
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And suddenly the moon withdraws her sickle from the lightening skies, and to her sombre cavern flies, wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze.
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Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.
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Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
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Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the dullness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange snakespotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud's building in the College of St. John.
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He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.
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Friendship never forgets. That is the wonderful thing about it.
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The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
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A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.
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The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair.
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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.
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Indeed, so far from being humorous, the male American is the most abnormally serious creature who ever existed.. It is only fair to admit that he can exaggerate, but even his exaggeration has a rational basis. It is not founded on wit or fancy; it does not spring from any poetic imagination.
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I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.
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At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.