Oscar Wilde Quotes

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It is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologize to one in private for what they have written against one in public.

Oscar Wilde
What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.

Oscar Wilde
The chin a little higher, dear. Style largely depends on the way the chin is worn. They are worn very high, just at present.

Oscar Wilde
Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.

Oscar Wilde
Poets know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.

Oscar Wilde
If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.

Oscar Wilde
A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.

Oscar Wilde
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of Science is that it is not emotional.

Oscar Wilde
Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.

Oscar Wilde
A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.

Oscar Wilde
Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid, but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.

Oscar Wilde
Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Oscar Wilde
As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

Oscar Wilde
I should have remembered that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals.

Oscar Wilde
Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne.

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
So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.

Oscar Wilde
As I lounged in the Park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at everyone who passed me, and wonder, with mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror.

Oscar Wilde
But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never more return? Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory.

Oscar Wilde
Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex, multiform creature that bears within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh is tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

Oscar Wilde
The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.

Oscar Wilde
The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself.

Oscar Wilde
There is a tiny yellow daffodil, The butterfly can see it from afar, Although one summer evening's dew could fill Its little cup twice over, ere the star Had called the lazy shepherd to his fold, And be no prodigal.

Oscar Wilde
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

Oscar Wilde
Is this the end of all that primal force Which, in its changes being still the same, From eyeless Chaos cleft its upward course, Through ravenous seas and whirling rocks and flame, Till the suns met in heaven and began Their cycles, and the morning stars sang, and the Word was Man!

Oscar Wilde
The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.

Oscar Wilde
Oh, no doubt the cod is a splendid swimmer - admirable for swimming purposes but not for eating.

Oscar Wilde
Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.

Oscar Wilde