Oscar Wilde Quotes

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Who is that man over there? I don't know him. What is he doing? Is he a conspirator? Have you searched him? Give him till tomorrow to confess, then hang him! -- hang him!

Oscar Wilde
The Bostonians take their learning too sadly: culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their "Hub," as they call it, is the paradise of prigs.

Oscar Wilde
As a rule, I think they are quite impossible. Geniuses talk so much, don't they? Such a bad habit! And they are always thinking about themselves, when I want them to be thinking about me.

Oscar Wilde
And once, or twice, to throw the dice is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin in the secret house of shame

Oscar Wilde
M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull.

Oscar Wilde
Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination.

Oscar Wilde
Now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

Oscar Wilde
CHILTERN: You think science cannot grapple with the problem of women?
CHEVELEY: Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.
CHILTERN: And women represent the irrational.

Oscar Wilde
We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with those virtues that are likely to benefit ourselves. 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.

Oscar Wilde
And thus we rust Life's iron chain
Degraded and alone:
And some men curse, and some men weep,
And some men make no moan:
But God's eternal Laws are kind
And break the heart of stone

Oscar Wilde
Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary charm in them, sometimes.

Oscar Wilde
Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid.

Oscar Wilde
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.

Oscar Wilde
To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not - there is no weakness in that.

Oscar Wilde
He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.

Oscar Wilde
What is truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one's last mood.

Oscar Wilde
Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.

Oscar Wilde
How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.

Oscar Wilde
You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.

Oscar Wilde