Oscar Wilde Quotes

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.

She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.

I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.

When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.

To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

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.

A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime.

It is perfectly possible to get what you think you want and be miserable. It's possible too, to never get it but deeply enjoy the process of trying. In this world, there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ

I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.

You are Beautiful when you are happy

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait)

There is no man who is not, at each moment, what he has been and what he will be.

Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.

I never play cricket. It requires one to assume such indecent postures.

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.

The face of the enemy frightens me only when I see how much it resembles me

I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.

Oscar Wilde was suing the Marquis of Queensbury in 1895 for libel accusing Wilde of homosexuality Counsel: Have you ever adored a young man madly? Wilde: I have never given adoration to anyone except myself.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music - his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting - that which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and all modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

He rides in the row at ten o clock in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night of the season. You don't call that leading an idle life, do you?

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

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

It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.

It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.

Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. ... For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.

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

Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.

A publisher is simply a useful middle-man.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.

Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off... p 207