Oscar Wilde Quotes
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The true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything.
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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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The problem with the common person is that he is so unbearably common!
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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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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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A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.
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I don't want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that, and I never pay mine.
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You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.
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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.
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I often take exercise. Why only yesterday I had breakfast in bed.
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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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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.
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She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.
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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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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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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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The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.
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Thinking is wonderful, but the experience is even more wonderful.
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It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
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I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.
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Children start out loving their parents, but as they grow older and discover their parents are human, they become judgmental. And sometimes, when they mature, they forgive their parents, especially when they discover they are also human.
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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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That is the mission of art - to make us pause and look at a thing a second time.
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Art should never be popular.