Oscar Wilde Quotes
Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
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.
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry.
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
Friendship...is not something you learn in school, but if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship you really haven't learned anything.
It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating- people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
He wants to enslave you.''I shudder at the thought of being free.
Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things.That is exactly what things were originally made for.
I wish you would tell me your secret. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page
the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirrored on every page
Lady Bracknell, I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?
As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied
Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
It is rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world.
Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. World's had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow...
...art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.
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.
And how delightful other people's emotions were!-much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends-those were the fascinating things in life.
When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.All art is quite useless.
It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote ‘King Lear.
To become a work of art is the object of living.
If something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land.
That is one of the great secrets of life Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Such actions are beyond praise: it is the perfume of such sweet and noble human sympathy that makes this wild beasts' cage a world habitable for men.
Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worse habits.
If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.