Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it comes into existence.
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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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The only sin is stupidity.
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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 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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Thinking is wonderful, but the experience is even more wonderful.
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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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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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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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Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.
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The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world.
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I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.
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A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people's toes.
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What you read when you don't have to...
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I did not think I should be ever loved: do you indeed Love me so much as now you say you do? Ask of the sea-bird if it loves the sea, Ask of the roses if they love the rain, Ask of the little lark, that will not sing Till day break, if it loves to see the day: And yet, these are but empty images, Mere shadows of my love, which is a fire So great that all the waters of the main Can not avail to quench it.
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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 moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.
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She doth mean the earth to me! By earth, I actually mean dust.
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The people who have adored me — there have not been very many, but there have been some — have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.
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Philosophy is like a normal personal organizer, but it's smaller than a matchbox.
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Every thing to be true must become a religion.
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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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It's not hard to get the ideas when they come. They just come... it's painful waiting for them.
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The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself.