Quotes by Oscar Wilde
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.
Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.
He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there.
A visionary is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world.
To have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact, talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you
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.
Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary.
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 ...
While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. Forgiveness
The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation. Technology
Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much. Forgiveness
Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her look like a public building.
The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.
The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
One knows so well the popular idea of health. The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the une...
For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.
...music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual. It is through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate impression itself.
Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.
Yes. I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punnishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
