QUOTES by Oscar Wilde
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“I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
Quote by -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.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.”
Quote by -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.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing character''
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“Oh I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“There is a fatality about good resolutions – that they are always made too late”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil, cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, Destiny never closed her accounts.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.”
Quote by -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. ”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
"Not with Women," said the duchess, shaking her head; "and women rule the world. I assure you we can't bear mediocrities. We women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all."
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“tone of colour 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.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.”
Quote by -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.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
"What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde
“Yes,’ he cried, ‘you have killed my love! You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never think of you. I will never mention your name. You can’t know what you were to me, once. Why, once… Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! I wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the romance of my life. How little you can know of love if you say it mars your art! Without your art you are nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshiped you, and you would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face.”
Quote by -Oscar Wilde