Oscar Wilde

Quotes

• “An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not...”
• “A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is...”
• “The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject matter of art is extremely distastef...”
• “Not the least of the twentieth-century phenomena that Wilde so uncannily anticipated was the cult of celebrity; and inde...”
• “For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fu...”
• “He had first to free English speech from its weight of serious meaning. He had to win for prose, for measured sentence a...”
• “There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touc...”
• “God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and ...”
• “Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint beauty ...”
• “The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and...”
• “The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Osc...”
• “Despite the number of his books and plays, Mr. Wilde was not, I think, what one calls a born writer. His writing seemed ...”
• “He (Jack London) wrote an essay called "What Life Means to Me" which takes its place with Kropotkin's "Appeal to the You...”
• “And he related also, with much gusto, how in a country-house he had told his host one evening that he had spent the day ...”
• “The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugl...”
• “All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for ...”
• “To drift with every passion till my soul Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, Is it for this that I have give...”
• “Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being...”
• “Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, a...”
• “What has Oscar in common with Art? except that he dines at our tables and picks from our platter the plums for the puddi...”
• “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would...”
• “Be happy, be happy; you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own he...”
• “There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises o...”
• “Kelvil: May I ask, Lord Illingworth, if you regard the House of Lords as a better institution than the House of Commons?...”
• “I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic abou...”
• “With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste hi...”
• “People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is...”
• “Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no cl...”
• “Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For wh...”
• “Quoted in "Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship" (1905) by Robert Harborough Sherard,. Greening & Company, Lo...”
• “Como Chesterton, como Lang, como Boswell, Wilde es de aquellos venturosos que pueden prescindir de la aprobación de la c...”
• “They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebo...”
• “To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount o...”
• “The reason Wilde did his best work after turning homosexual is that women simply reinforced his own feminine sentimental...”
• “Like Chesterton, like Lang, like Boswell, Wilde is one of the happy few who do not need the approval of the critic, nor ...”
• “Jack: That, my dear Algy, is the whole truth pure and simple. Algernon: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Moder...”
• “Lord Caversham: No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex. L...”
• “The earliest known example of this quote comes from Walter Winchell's syndicated newspaper column in mid-January 1955: '...”
• “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to sile...”
• “After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second glass you see things as they are not. Final...”
• “If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture...In a house, we all feel of the proper p...”
• “Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really ...”
• “Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris. Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And whe...”
• “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of lovi...”
• “Voltaire, "L'illusion est le premier plaisir" from the satirical poem "La Pucelle d'Orléans" [The Maid of Orleans]. For ...”
• “Leyendo y releyendo, a lo largo de los años, a Wilde, noto un hecho que sus panegiristas no parecen haber sospechado siq...”
• “The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curiou...”
• “This too I know-and wise it were If each could know the same- That every prison that men build Is built with bricks of s...”
• “Reading and re-reading Wilde throughout the years, I notice a fact that people who praise him apparently haven't in the ...”
• “There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be ...”