Oscar Wilde Quotes

Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that

Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly.

Oscar Wilde

Damn it all, MacMurrough, are you telling me you are an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?’‘If you mean am I Irish, the answer is yes.

Jamie O'Neill

Do you want to kill his love for you? What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great political career, if you close the doors of public life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success? Women are not meant to judge us but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission. Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew himself? A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A women's life revolves around curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that man's life progresses. Don't make any terrible mistake, Lady Chiltern. A woman who can keep a man's love, and love him in return, has done all the world wants of women, or should want of them.

Oscar Wilde

The pure and simple truth is, the truth is never pure and simple.

Oscar Wilde

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Oscar Wilde

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.Vice and virtue are the artist’s materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feelings, the actor’s craft is the type. 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 spectators, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Oscar Wilde

He was a man of most subtle and refined intellect. A man of culture, charm, and distinction. One of the most intellectual men I ever met.""I prefer a gentlemanly fool any day. There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally I have a great admiration for stupidity. It is a sort of fellow-feeling, I suppose.

Oscar Wilde

The optimist sees the doughnut but the pessimist see 452 calories and a shed load of sugar ...

James Minter

All the quips in the world couldn’t prevent Oscar Wilde from becoming a lovesick fool.

David Levithan

... Likewise, Oscar Wilde asked an English journalist to look over 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' before publication: "Will you also look after my 'wills' and 'shalls' in proof. I am Celtic in my use of these words, not English." Wilde's novel upset virtually every code of late Victorian respectability, but he had to get his modal auxiliaries just right.

Andrew Elfenbein

the people who love only 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 failure. a

Oscar Wilde

The drawback of stealing a thing, is that one never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is.

Oscar Wilde

You dislike Basil because, without his art, his life is horribly plain. Unlike Dorian who has made an art out of his life. Basil produces art; Dorian consumes it and lets it overwhelm him.

Abed Yaman

Marriage is a matter for common sense.""But women who have common sense are so curiously plain, father, aren't they? Of course I only speak from heresay?""No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex.

Oscar Wilde

For his mourners will be outcast menAnd outcasts always mourn...

Oscar Wilde

Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.

Oscar Wilde

WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made — the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.)

Tom Stoppard

Oh bless Speranza, for giving her son such a preposterous name as Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

Mary Ann Shaffer

To lose one parent might be considered a misfortune, or a reason to deny God’s existence at the least. To lose two looks like He may be up to something.

Johnny Rich

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

Oscar Wilde

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (this excerpt inspired my book, The Persecution of Mildred Dunlap. Wilde wrote it to his lover while in prison.)When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realizing what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. 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.

Paulette Mahurin

He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.

Oscar Wilde

I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love.

Oscar Wilde

I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.

Oscar Wilde

Indeed, as a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else.

Oscar Wilde

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

England is seen at its worst when it has to deal with men like Wilde. In Germany Wilde and Byron are appreciated as authors: in England they still go pecking about their love-affairs. Anyone who calls a book ‘immoral’ or 'moral’ should be caned. A book by itself can be neither. It is only a question of the morality or immorality of the reader. But the English approach all questions of vice with such a curious mixture of curiosity and fear that it’s impossible to deal with them.

Charles Hamilton Sorley

Du Bois sighed theatrically. “It’s as if Oscar Wilde never died for our sins.

Gavin G. Smith

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

Those were my last words. To be listed in some book of quotations, alphabetically after

Roberta Pearce

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

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

Harold Bloom

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

Oscar Wilde: "I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar; you will.

James McNeill Whistler

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

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, on the 15th October, 1856, so that he is now about twenty-six years of age, but brief as has been his career, it has been full of promise for the future. The son of highly intellectual parents, he has had an exceptional education, has travelled much in wild and remote, through classic lands, and in the course of these journeys has learnt to appreciate the beauties of the old authors, in whose works whilst at college he attained exceptional proficiency. But his naturally enthusiastic temperament teaches him to hope for better in the future than has been achieved in the past, and to see how vast will be the influence of Art and Literature on the coming democracy of Intellect, when education and culture shall have taught men to pride themselves on what they have done, and not alone on the deeds of their ancestors.

Walter Hamilton

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

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Oscar Wilde Quotes

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