Oscar Wilde Quotes

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind mechanical forces of Society, and who does not recognise the dynamic force when he meets it either in a man or a movement.

A we wszystkich romansach najgorsze jest to, że człowiek wychodzi z nich pozbawiony wszelkiego romantyzmu.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.

To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.

So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets...

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture...In a house, we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.

Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.

Gerald: I suppose society is wonderfully delightful? Lord Illingworth: To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy.

My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect — simply a confession of failures.

Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.

"Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden."
"But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!"
"I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing."
"That may be, but the muffins are the same!"

In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and, as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them...A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions - one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral.

Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.