Sir Oscar Wilde, how ever so quotable he is. His words have a magical way about them.They are full of wit and quip. It is quite a talent for one who has passed away 108 years ago, God rest his mighty soul, to leave behind such amazing words and phrases that stand the test of time and are still quite relevant today. I do hope you enjoy my extractions for I feel they are rather humorous, entertaining, truthful, sad and above all inspiring.
May these words bring worlds to you.
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- The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
- Those who are faithful know only the pleasures of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
- She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.
- Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.
- I can resist everything except temptation.
- It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
- History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
- I prefer women with a past. They're always so deemed amusing to talk to.
- Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
- Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.
- Moderation is a fatal thing, Lady Hunstanton. Nothing succeeds like excess.
- Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.
- In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.
- Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
- Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious.
- Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.
- To be great is to be misunderstood.
- A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
- A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
- And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness
so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
- All art is immoral.
- It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
- Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
- No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
- Art persists, it timelessly continues.
- Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
- Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
- Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.
- The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
- It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and
art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
- As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is
looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
- There is no sin except stupidity.
- Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
- There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
- No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
- All art is at once surface and symbol.
- It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
- All bad art is the result of good intentions.
- There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
- Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.
- A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
- Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
- The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
- Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
- Genius lasts longer than beauty.
- If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.
- The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
- He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.
- The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
- It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is
the visible, not the invisible.
- Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.
- The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray…
- Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
- Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
- Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.
- When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others.
- People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.
- The people who love only 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 failure.
- Punctuality is the thief of time.
- There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
- Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
- To be in love is to surpass one's self.
- The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
- Conscience makes egotists of us all.
- It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
- You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
- Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
- I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.
- Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.
- A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
- Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.
- To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
- To define is to limit.
- A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.
- To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
- The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
- Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.
- I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
- My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
- Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
- My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.
- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
- In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
- What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
- What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.
- Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time
that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
- The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.
- It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
- In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are
written by the public and read by nobody.
- Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.
- Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
- To be really medieval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul.
To be really Greek one should have no clothes.
- Those whom the gods love grow young.
- Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
- Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
- If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
- Only the shallow know themselves.
- In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
- The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.
- To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
- I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.
- I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy.
- The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.
- Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
- The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty and to someone else if she is plain.
- To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
- All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
- The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
- In married life, three is company, and two is none.
- Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music,
people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
- It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't.
More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
- I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.
- No gentleman ever has any money.
- I hope you're not leading a double life, pretending to be wicked while
being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
- If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being immensely over-educated.
- Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs.
One must eat muffins quite calmly, it is the only way to eat them.
- Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.
- Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.
- Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.
- I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
- Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do.
- Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.
- All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.
- Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
- The only possible society is oneself.
- My dear father, when one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.
- High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the
bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
- Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
- Charity creates a multitude of sins.
- Closed eyes listen, afraid to see on their own. Easily influenced and simply conformed.
- Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
- Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
- The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes.
Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.
- I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.
- It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
- The supreme vice is shallowness.
- Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde
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