Oscar Wilde Quotes

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

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

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

Oscar Wilde
And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.

Oscar Wilde
Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful insects.

Oscar Wilde
That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance.

Oscar Wilde
Women have become so highly educated... that nothing should surprise us nowadays, except happy marriages.

Oscar Wilde
Is it thy will that I should wax and wane,
Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey,
And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain
Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day?

Oscar Wilde
For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.

Oscar Wilde
It is curious how vanity helps the successful man and wrecks the failure.

Oscar Wilde
I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere.

Oscar Wilde
The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake.

Oscar Wilde
On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.

Oscar Wilde
I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.

Oscar Wilde
I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one's life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon's head, and one suffers, because it does not turn one to stone.

Oscar Wilde
That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.

Oscar Wilde
Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry.

Oscar Wilde
In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

Oscar Wilde
George Moore leads his readers to the latrine and locks them in.

Oscar Wilde
In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.

Oscar Wilde
The gods bestowed on Max [Beerbohm] the gift of perpetual old age.

Oscar Wilde
The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.

Oscar Wilde
The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind.

Oscar Wilde
"What are fireworks like?" she asked. "They are like the Aurora Borealis," said the King. "only much more natural. I prefer them to stars myself, as you always know when they are going to appear."

Oscar Wilde
Give children beauty, not the record of bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls, as they call history, or of the latitude and longitude of places nobody cares to visit, as they call geography.

Oscar Wilde
Now and then it is a joy to have one's table red with wine and roses.

Oscar Wilde
Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow.

Oscar Wilde
He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.

Oscar Wilde