Oscar Wilde Quotes
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To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not - there is no weakness in that.
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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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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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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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Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.
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The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.
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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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Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
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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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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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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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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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Imagination is imitative-the real innovation lies in criticism.
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American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.
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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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That is the mission of art - to make us pause and look at a thing a second time.
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Bad manners make a journalist.
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To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.
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You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
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An egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different.
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The sky was pure opal now.
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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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Ah, on what little things does happiness depend.
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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.