Oscar Wilde Quotes
Oscar Wilde Quotes. Below is a collection of famous Oscar Wilde quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by Oscar Wilde. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist -- the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar.
By Oscar Wilde
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!
By Oscar Wilde
When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.
By Oscar Wilde
Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
By Oscar Wilde
I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.
By Oscar Wilde
The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. 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. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.
By Oscar Wilde
Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.
By Oscar Wilde
Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.
By Oscar Wilde
It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
By Oscar Wilde
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
By Oscar Wilde
The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.
By Oscar Wilde
I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.
By Oscar Wilde
And beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.
By Oscar Wilde
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.
By Oscar Wilde
In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
By Oscar Wilde
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art. Art
By Oscar Wilde
Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One
By Oscar Wilde
No great artist ever sees things as they really are, if he did he would cease to be an artist.
By Oscar Wilde
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Art
By Oscar Wilde
All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. Art
By Oscar Wilde
Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.
By Oscar Wilde
People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.
By Oscar Wilde
The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.
By Oscar Wilde
Yet each man kills the thing he loves, from all let this be heard. Some does it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss the brave man with the sword
By Oscar Wilde