Oscar Wilde Quotes - Page 4

Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth.
Oscar Wilde
I don't want to earn a living, I want to live.
Oscar Wilde
Within this restless, hurried, modern worldWe took our hearts' full pleasure - You and I,And now the white sails of our ship are furled,And spent the lading of our argosy.Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,For very weeping is my gladness fled,Sorrow has paled my young mouth's vermilion,And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.But all this crowded life has been to theeNo more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spellOf viols, or the music of the seaThat sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
Oscar Wilde
I have forgotten all about my school days. I have a vague impression that they were detestable.
Oscar Wilde
There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.
Oscar Wilde
I can write no stately proemAs a prelude to my lay;From a poet to a poemI would dare to say.For if of these fallen petalsOne to you seem fair,Love will waft it till it settlesOn your hair.And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.
Oscar Wilde
There was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance.
Oscar Wilde
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast,
Oscar Wilde
this woman is a genius in the day time and a beauty at night
Oscar Wilde
Never mind what I say. I am always saying what I shouldn't say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.
Oscar Wilde
My doctor says I must not have any serious conversation after seven [o'clock]. It makes me talk in my sleep.
Oscar Wilde
Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? Do you really think, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not-there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, terrible courage. I had that courage.
Oscar Wilde
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
Oscar Wilde
Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.
Oscar Wilde
A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacrifice to me, a useless sacrifice.
Oscar Wilde
I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought:
Oscar Wilde
You told me you had destroyed it.""I was wrong. It has destroyed me.
Oscar Wilde
because to influence a person is to give one's own soul.
Oscar Wilde
There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.
Oscar Wilde
What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed Lord Henry. " A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
Oscar Wilde
He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.
Oscar Wilde
My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.
Oscar Wilde
Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy…
Oscar Wilde
What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than begin talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.
Oscar Wilde
She lives in the poetry she cannot write.
Oscar Wilde
Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination
Oscar Wilde
. . . try as we may we cannot get behind things to the reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in things apart from their appearances.
Oscar Wilde
But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.
Oscar Wilde
Dorian, Dorian," she cried, "before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came—oh, my beautiful love!— and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection.
Oscar Wilde
How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.""Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.""I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.
Oscar Wilde
It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world
Oscar Wilde
She...can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it.
Oscar Wilde
I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.
Oscar Wilde
I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.
Oscar Wilde
The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.
Oscar Wilde
Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.
Oscar Wilde
It was winter, and a night of bitter cold. The snow lay thick upon the ground, and upon the branches of the trees: the frost kept snapping the little twigs on either side of them, as they passed: and when they came to the Mountain-Torrent she was hanging motionless in air, for the Ice-King had kissed her.
Oscar Wilde
Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid.Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.
Oscar Wilde
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious
Oscar Wilde
Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day.
Oscar Wilde
Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.
Oscar Wilde
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
Oscar Wilde
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde
Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?
Oscar Wilde
Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
Oscar Wilde
Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them
Oscar Wilde
Those whom the gods love grow young.
Oscar Wilde
It is the duty of every father... to write fairy tales for his children.
Oscar Wilde
There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims....
Oscar Wilde
I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.
Oscar Wilde
Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people.And falsehoods the truths of other people.Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
Oscar Wilde
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
Oscar Wilde
The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.
Oscar Wilde
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Oscar Wilde
The moon in her chariot of pearl
Oscar Wilde
People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.
Oscar Wilde
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
Oscar Wilde
His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.
Oscar Wilde
No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him...As for the virtuous poor...they have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very poor pottage.
Oscar Wilde
Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue.
Oscar Wilde