Oscar Wilde Quotes - Page 12

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read

I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.

Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Salomé, Salomé, dance for me. I pray thee dance for me. I am sad to-night. Yes, I am passing sad to-night. When I came hither I slipped in blood, which is an evil omen; and I heard, I am sure I heard in the air a beating of wings, a beating of giant wings. I cannot tell what they mean .... I am sad to-night. Therefore dance for me. Dance for me, Salomé, I beseech you. If you dance for me you may ask of me what you will, and I will give it you, even unto the half of my kingdom.

[Letter to William Ward, 11 July 1878]Dear Boy, Why don’t you write to me? I don’t know what has become of you.As for me I am ruined. The law suit is going against me and I am afraid I will have to pay costs, which means leaving Oxford and doing some horrid work to earn bread. The world is too much for me.However, I have seen Greece and had some golden days of youth. I go back to Oxford immediately for viva voce and then think of rowing up the river to town with Frank Miles. Will you come? YoursOscar

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is.

It was winter, and a night of bitter cold. The snow lay thick upon the ground, and upon the branches of the trees: the frost kept snapping the little twigs on either side of them, as they passed: and when they came to the Mountain-Torrent she was hanging motionless in air, for the Ice-King had kissed her.

The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.

As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.

Art, like Nature, has her monsters

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.

By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.

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.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

She...can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it.

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.

It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible not the invisible.

The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

...art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.

A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacrifice to me, a useless sacrifice.

Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

Mary Farquhar, who always flirts with her own husband across the dinner-table. That is not very pleasant. Indeed, it is not even decent . . . and that sort of thing is enormously on the increase. The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public...

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

You are not listening to a word I am saying . . . and I am making the most delightful plans for your future.

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree.

LADY BRACKNELLTo speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

He wants to enslave you.''I shudder at the thought of being free.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five

The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.