Oscar Wilde Quotes - Page 8

MISS PRISMMemory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Oscar Wilde
The one charm about the past is that it is the past.
Oscar Wilde
You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play. I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
Oscar Wilde
If it was my business, I wouldn't talk about it. It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbroker's do that, and then merely at dinner parties.
Oscar Wilde
I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss.
Oscar Wilde
Are ALL men bad?Oh, all of them, my dear, all of them, without any exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good..
Oscar Wilde
I would sooner lose my best friend than my worst enemy. To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.
Oscar Wilde
It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity, But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.
Oscar Wilde
That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.
Oscar Wilde
In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?
Oscar Wilde
The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.
Oscar Wilde
My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.
Oscar Wilde
Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
Oscar Wilde
You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing. You lost life's secret.
Oscar Wilde
I give the truths of to-morrow.""I prefer the mistakes of today.
Oscar Wilde
All I want to do now is look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.
Oscar Wilde
How pale the Princess is! Never have I seen her so pale. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver.
Oscar Wilde
A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.
Oscar Wilde
It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it
Oscar Wilde
A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older.
Oscar Wilde
Utterly, irrevocably, lost
Oscar Wilde
You can have your secret as long as I have your heart[.]
Oscar Wilde
You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty.
Oscar Wilde
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
Oscar Wilde
And, certainly to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.
Oscar Wilde
All I want now is to look at life.
Oscar Wilde
Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.
Oscar Wilde
I don't like compliments and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.
Oscar Wilde
Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather an other chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
Oscar Wilde
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .
Oscar Wilde
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.      The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Oscar Wilde
Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as if it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.
Oscar Wilde
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read
Oscar Wilde
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.
Oscar Wilde
Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread.
Oscar Wilde
I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say.
Oscar Wilde
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
Oscar Wilde
Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.
Oscar Wilde
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Oscar Wilde
I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
Oscar Wilde
He discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels. In Alphonso's Clericalis Disciplina a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander, the Conqueror of Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordan snakes 'with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs.' There was a gem in the brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us, and 'by the exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe' the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep and slain. According to the great alchemist, Pierre de Boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made him eloquent. The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. The garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her color. The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids. Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a newly killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison. The bezoar, that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charm that could cure the plague. In the nests of Arabian birds was the aspirates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from any danger by fire.
Oscar Wilde
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.
Oscar Wilde
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Oscar Wilde
I don't want to earn my living, I want to live.
Oscar Wilde
I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.
Oscar Wilde
Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.
Oscar Wilde
It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.
Oscar Wilde
Man is many things, but he is not rational.
Oscar Wilde
Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef ... Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees...
Oscar Wilde
We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces
Oscar Wilde
Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.
Oscar Wilde
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.
Oscar Wilde
Outside the family circle, papa, I'm glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man.
Oscar Wilde
Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.''You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry.''Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?''Before either.''I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry,' said the lad.'Then you shall come; and you will come, too, Basil, won't you?''I can't, really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do.''Well, then you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray.''I should like that awfully.'The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. 'I shall stay with the real Dorian,' he said, sadly.
Oscar Wilde
The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice.
Oscar Wilde
I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows.
Oscar Wilde
So overjoyed were they at their deliverance that they laughed aloud, and the Earth seemed to them like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold.
Oscar Wilde
There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.
Oscar Wilde
Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.
Oscar Wilde
Life at times loses its sense of reality; it appears to us like a weird, optical illusion - a phantasmagoric bubble that will disappear at the slightest breath.
Oscar Wilde