Oscar Wilde Quotes
-
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.
-
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.
-
It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world.
-
Imagination is imitative-the real innovation lies in criticism.
-
If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.
-
Ah, on what little things does happiness depend.
-
It's not hard to get the ideas when they come. They just come... it's painful waiting for them.
-
The only sin is stupidity.
-
Bad manners make a journalist.
-
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.
-
Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.
-
People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.
-
All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns.
-
The proper school to learn art is not life but art.
-
I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me.
-
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.
-
Varnishing is the only artistic process with which Royal Academicians are thoroughly familiar.
-
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.
-
Friendship never forgets. That is the wonderful thing about it.
-
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
-
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.
-
A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.
-
A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people's toes.
-
She doth mean the earth to me! By earth, I actually mean dust.