Oscar Wilde Quotes - Page 10

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.

My gods dwell in temples made with hands.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

There is no such thing as romance in our day women have become too brilliant nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman.

Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.''You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry.''Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?''Before either.''I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry,' said the lad.'Then you shall come; and you will come, too, Basil, won't you?''I can't, really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do.''Well, then you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray.''I should like that awfully.'The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. 'I shall stay with the real Dorian,' he said, sadly.

A lily-girl, not made for this world’s pain.

There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us.

I'm too old to know everything

Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.

Men become old but they never become good.

The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.

Pessimist - one who when he has the choice of two evils chooses both.

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development.

I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.

I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.

He is fairer than the morning star, and whiter than the moon. For his body I would give my soul, and for his love I would surrender heaven.

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef ... Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees...

To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote ‘King Lear.

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

JACK: I will be back in a few moments, dear Canon. Gwendolen! Wait here for me!GWENDOLEN: If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

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.

There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has the right to blame us.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.

I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.

You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.

We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces

The one charm about the past is that it is the past.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.

Of course to one so modern as I am, `Enfant de mon siècle,’ merely to look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer. Like Gautier, I have always been one of those ‘pour qui le monde visible existe.

Never mind what I say. I am always saying what I shouldn't say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

A kiss may ruin a human life

No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him...As for the virtuous poor...they have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very poor pottage.

You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty.

And to the little Squirrel who lived in the fir-tree, and was lonely, he said, 'Where is my mother?' And the Squirrel answered, 'Thou hast slain mine. Dost thou seek to slay thine also?

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, 'You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.

An educated person's ideas of Art are drwan naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.

Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.

He discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels. In Alphonso's Clericalis Disciplina a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander, the Conqueror of Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordan snakes 'with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs.' There was a gem in the brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us, and 'by the exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe' the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep and slain. According to the great alchemist, Pierre de Boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made him eloquent. The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. The garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her color. The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids. Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a newly killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison. The bezoar, that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charm that could cure the plague. In the nests of Arabian birds was the aspirates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from any danger by fire.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.

Ordinary riches can be stolen real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

Bosie has insisted on stopping here for sandwiches. He is quite like a narcissus -- so white and gold. I will come either Wednesday or Thursday night to your rooms. Send me a line. Bosie is so tired: he lies like a hyacinth on the sofa, and I worship him. (letter from Oscar Wilde, 1892 - quoted from Love in a dark time by Colm Toibin)

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.