Oscar Wilde Quotes

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us.

Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.

I gave my genius to my life, but my talent to my art.

When I see a spade, I call it a spade. I'm glad to say I have never seen a spade. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use it. It's the only thing he's fit for.

A grand passion is the privelege of people who have nothing to do.

In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.

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.

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.

God, bless me with luxury. Necessities I can do without.

Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses - once.

I forget what killed it. I think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. That is always a dreadful moment. It fills one with the terror of eternity.

As a wicked man I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back.

There was purification in punishment. Not 'Forgive us our sins,' but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of a man to a most just God.

It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

Then there was a man who said, 'I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; by then it was too late'

All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.

So lets knock a couple back and make some noise

A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.

The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk.

Men of thoughts should have nothing to do with action.

When I had to fill in my immigration papers, I gave my age as 19, and my profession as genius; I added that I had nothing to declare except my talent.

The only way to atone for being occasionally overdressed is to be massively overeducated.

If it is not nailed to the floor, it's mine. If I can pry it loose, it is not nailed down.

He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.

Everyone should keep someone else's diary.

The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind.

I'm sure I don't know half the people who come to my house. Indeed, from all I hear, I shouldn't like to.

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.

Conscience makes egotists of us all.

I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.

The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.

Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant.

One should absorb the color of life.

And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.

The world seemed to me fine because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived.

The supreme vice is shallowness.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pères ont toujours tort.

The sin was mine; I did not understand. So now is music prisoned in her cave, Save where some ebbing desultory wave Frets with its restless whirls this meagre strand.

The Bostonians take their learning too sadly: culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their "Hub," as they call it, is the paradise of prigs.

But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

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.

Most people are boring and stupid.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

The only way to get rid of tempation is to yeild to it.

The story of mankind began in a garden and ended in revelations.

Those who have much are often greedy. Those who have little always share.