Quotes by Playwrights - Page 198

Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not.
Oscar Wilde
The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.
Oscar Wilde
Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig.
Oscar Wilde
Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.
Oscar Wilde
Suppose neutral angels were able to talk, Yahweh and Lucifer – God and Satan, to use their popular titles – into settling out of court. What would be the terms of the compromise? Specifically, how would they divide the assets of their early kingdom?Would God be satisfied the loaves and fishes and itty-bitty thimbles of Communion wine, while Satan to have the red-eye gravy, eighteen-ounce New York Stakes, and buckets of chilled champagne? Would God really accept twice-a-month lovemaking for procreative purposes and give Satan the all night, no-holds-barred, nasty “can’t-get-enough-of-you” hot-as-hell-fucks?Think about it. Would Satan get New Orleans, Bangkok, and the French Riviera and God get Salt Lake City? Satan get ice hockey, God get horseshoes? God get bingo, Satan get stud poker? Satan get LSD; God, Prozac? God get Neil Simon; Satan Oscar Wilde?
Oscar Wilde
Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also.
Oscar Wilde
Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.
Oscar Wilde
Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is.
Oscar Wilde
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.
Oscar Wilde
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
Oscar Wilde
But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.
Oscar Wilde
The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.
Oscar Wilde
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.
Oscar Wilde
I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
Oscar Wilde
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
Oscar Wilde
It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.
Oscar Wilde
In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
Oscar Wilde
The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
Oscar Wilde
If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.
Oscar Wilde
Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Oscar Wilde
Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
Oscar Wilde
Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.
Oscar Wilde
Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.
Oscar Wilde
I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.
Oscar Wilde
The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.
Oscar Wilde
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
Oscar Wilde
You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
Oscar Wilde
I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful
Oscar Wilde
The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
Oscar Wilde
When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.
Oscar Wilde
I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!
Oscar Wilde
Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.
Oscar Wilde
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.
Oscar Wilde
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.
Oscar Wilde
Now I've gone for too longLiving like I'm not aliveSo I'm going to start over tonightBeginning with you and I
Oscar Wilde
I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.
Oscar Wilde
Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is.
Oscar Wilde
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Oscar Wilde
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
Oscar Wilde
But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.
Oscar Wilde
What fire does not destroy, it hardens
Oscar Wilde
Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.
Oscar Wilde
I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
Oscar Wilde
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
Oscar Wilde
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
Oscar Wilde
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde
I have nothing to declare except my genius.
Oscar Wilde
No good deed goes unpunished.
Oscar Wilde
I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
Oscar Wilde
Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.
Oscar Wilde
The heart was made to be broken.
Oscar Wilde
The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
Oscar Wilde
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
Oscar Wilde
Who, being loved, is poor?
Oscar Wilde
Yet each man kills the thing he lovesBy each let this be heardSome do it with a bitter lookSome with a flattering wordThe coward does it with a kissThe brave man with a sword
Oscar Wilde
One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.
Oscar Wilde
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
Oscar Wilde
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