Oscar Wilde Quotes

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The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.

Oscar Wilde
Set in this stormy Northern sea, Queen of these restless fields of tide, England! what shall men say of thee, Before whose feet the worlds divide?

Oscar Wilde
I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching -that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.

Oscar Wilde
We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone.

Oscar Wilde
The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

Oscar Wilde
Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all.

Oscar Wilde
In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

Oscar Wilde
Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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