Oscar Wilde Quotes

Looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not.

It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institutions of private property.

Flowers are as common in the country as people are in London.

Now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all!

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.

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

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

When a golden girl can win Prayer from out the lips of sin, When the barren almond bears, And a little child gives away its tears, Then shall all the house be still And peace come to Canterville.

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

What the hell is an oboe?

Bad artists always admire each others work.

The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. The past, the present and the future are but one moment in the sight of God, in whose sight we should try to live. Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought. The imagination can transcend them.

For one moment our lives met, our souls touched.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.

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

An idea that isn't risky is hardly worth calling an idea.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimagininative.

Love is a misunderstanding between two fools.

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

All criticism is a form of autobiography

We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon werage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago.

There is only good art and mediocre art.

There is no sin except stupidity.

When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.

Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow.

More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn't read.

Oh, he occasionally takes an alcoholiday.

If people were meant to be nude, they would have been born this way.

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.

A burnt child loves the fire.

People may fail many times, but they become failures only when they begin to blame someone else. Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life.

Music is the art... which most completely realizes the artistic idea and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.

Yes, very sensible... People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

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

Marriage is a long, dull meal with dessert served at the beginning.

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

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid.

It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless.

There are few things easier than to live badly and die well.

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.