Oscar Wilde Quotes
-
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.
-
Art should never be popular.
-
The one advantage of playing with fire...is that no one ever gets singed. It is the people who don't know how to play with it who get burned up.
-
A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?
-
I'm too old to know everything.
-
It's not hard to get the ideas when they come. They just come... it's painful waiting for them.
-
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.
-
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 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 like my food dry. Not sick, not even dying, dead.
-
Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.
-
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.
-
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.
-
Examinations, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.
-
The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.
-
It is so easy to convince others; it is so difficult to convince oneself.
-
She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.
-
Truth is independent of facts always.
-
She doth mean the earth to me! By earth, I actually mean dust.
-
I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her.
-
Some things are too important to be taken seriously.
-
The sin was mine; I did not understand. So now is music prisoned in her cave, Save where some ebbing desultory wave Frets with its restless whirls this meagre strand...
-
The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.