Oscar Wilde Quotes - Page 5

When a love comes to an end weaklings cry efficient ones instantly find another love and the wise already have one in reserve.

Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread.

The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.

So with curious eyes and sick surmiseWe watched him day by day,And wondered if each one of usWould end the self-same way,For none can tell to what red HellHis sightless soul may stray.

Die Welt ist von Narren geschaffen, damit Weise in ihr Leben.

Experience is a question of instinct about life.

You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.

If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that?I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.

You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all.

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.

Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.

I can write no stately proemAs a prelude to my lay;From a poet to a poemI would dare to say.For if of these fallen petalsOne to you seem fair,Love will waft it till it settlesOn your hair.And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Who, being loved, is poor?

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?

Everything is going to be fine in the end. If it's not fine it's not the end.

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.

People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.

I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.

Men always want to be a woman's first love, -women want to be a man's last romance.

I can believe anything provided it is incredible.

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

Niagara ... is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.

The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.

To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.

To have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact talk to every woman as if you loved her and to every man as if he bored you.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Education is an admirable thing but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power.

I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand

You told me you had destroyed it.""I was wrong. It has destroyed me.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.    To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.      The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

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

She lives in the poetry she cannot write.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art

I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours.

I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.

What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts.

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium

He hasn't an enemy in the world and none of his friends like him.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things

I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.

Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as if it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.

Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on... The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.

Dear little Swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery.