Oscar Wilde Quotes - Page 4

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

You can have your secret as long as I have your heart[.]

Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.

There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

So overjoyed were they at their deliverance that they laughed aloud, and the Earth seemed to them like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.

In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

Now I've gone for too longLiving like I'm not aliveSo I'm going to start over tonightBeginning with you and I

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.

Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.

Life at times loses its sense of reality; it appears to us like a weird, optical illusion - a phantasmagoric bubble that will disappear at the slightest breath.

When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life. Now that I'm old - I know it is.

The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.

There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dénouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display.

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: … But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.(Act I., lines 132-140)

To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.

People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet—

It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world

Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.

The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.

JACKThat is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury.ALGERNONThen your wife will. You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none.JACKThat, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.ALGERNONYes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time.

When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast

The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.

If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

What fire does not destroy, it hardens

That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.

And the young Fisherman said to himself: "How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.

LADY BRACKNELLThirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. Lady Dumbleton is an instance in point. To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was many years ago now.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid.Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.

He was a man of most subtle and refined intellect. A man of culture, charm, and distinction. One of the most intellectual men I ever met.""I prefer a gentlemanly fool any day. There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally I have a great admiration for stupidity. It is a sort of fellow-feeling, I suppose.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.

It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.