Oscar Wilde Quotes

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A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public to him are non-existent.

Oscar Wilde
And then Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch.

Oscar Wilde
Every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim.

Oscar Wilde
Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

Oscar Wilde
It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

Oscar Wilde
It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.

Oscar Wilde
Ah! that quite does for me. I haven't a word to say... Too much care was taken with our education, I am afraid. To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one out from so much.

Oscar Wilde
The English public always feels perfectly at ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.

Oscar Wilde
Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

Oscar Wilde
We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon werage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago.

Oscar Wilde
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.

Oscar Wilde
Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.

Oscar Wilde
What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence.

Oscar Wilde
The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.

Oscar Wilde
He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.

Oscar Wilde
As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.

Oscar Wilde
Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.

Oscar Wilde
And suddenly the moon withdraws her sickle from the lightening skies, and to her sombre cavern flies, wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze.

Oscar Wilde
Just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in trying to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate himself.

Oscar Wilde
No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.

Oscar Wilde
People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies.

Oscar Wilde
It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.

Oscar Wilde
Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and having invaded the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarizing mankind.

Oscar Wilde
To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.

Oscar Wilde
Like two doomed ships that pass in storm we had crossed each other's way: but we made no sign, we said no word, we had no word to say.

Oscar Wilde
Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented.

Oscar Wilde
Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.

Oscar Wilde
At six o'clock we cleaned our cells,
At seven all was still,
But the sough and swing of a mighty wing
The prison seemed to fill,
For the Lord of Death with icy breath
Had entered in to kill.

Oscar Wilde
My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.

Oscar Wilde
It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.

Oscar Wilde