Oscar Wilde Quotes

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

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

Wisdom comes with winters

The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.

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

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

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

Bad artists always admire each others work.

I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.

And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand.

What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.

And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws.

Ah, on what little things does happiness depend.

A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people's toes.

Reforms in Russia are very tragic, but they always end in a farce.

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

When good Americans die they go to Paris.

It is what we fear that happens to us.

Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.

It is awfully hard work doing nothing.

Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned.

There are two ways of disliking poetry, one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.

If God wished to punish us, all he would need to do would be to answer our prayers.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

God and other artists are always a little obscure.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.

The ability of the theist to misunderstand a thing is directly proportional to the obviousness of the thing.

I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.

Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.

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.

In fact, I am never wrong.

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

There is a fatality about good resolutions – that they are always made too late

It is sweet to dance to violins When love and life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!

The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.

No publisher should ever express an opinion of the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide.

Something was dead in each of us, and what was dead was hope

The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.

Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it.

I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.