Quotes About Oscar Wilde

And, by the way, one of the most delightful things I find in America is meeting a people without prejudice -- everywhere open to the truth.

Biography," observed Oscar Wilde, "lends to death a new terror.

But no one will understand Oscar Wilde who for a moment loses sight of the fact that he was a pagan born: as Gautier says, "One for whom the visible world alone exists," endowed with all the Greek sensuousness and love of plastic beauty; a pagan, like Nietzsche and Gautier, wholly out of sympathy with Christianity, one of "the Confraternity of the faithless who "cannot" believe," (His own words in "De Profundis.") to whom a sense of sin and repentance are symptoms of weakness and disease.

There is a homely directness about these rustic apothegms which makes them far more palatable than the strained and sophisticated epigrams of the characters of Oscar Wilde's plays, who are ever striving strenuously to dazzle us with verbal pyrotechnics.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in 'Dorian Gray' - a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile.

I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious." "Oh, that's nonsense, Algy. You never talk anything but nonsense." "Nobody ever does.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. — Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

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 had already highlighted this problem in 1892 when depicting a cynic as "a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing".

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibers, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself, and passion has its dreams.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.

Do you really think... that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment... there is no weakness in that.

today may prove essential in the future." I could not argue with her reasoning. "It's sound advice and you know it," she continued. "So don't play Oscar Wilde. In this case, the only thing to do is not to pass it on." I smiled, relieved as the tension between us dissipated. "Thank you,

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women...merely adored.

There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.

La coerenza è l'estremo rifugio degli uomini privi di fantasia, sono intervenuto io. Ancora Wilde, non sapevo resistere.

British Society during the time of Crowley's life was repressed, inhibited, homophobic, arrogant, and thoroughly kept in check. Along came Aleister Crowley, a giant of an intellectual, a man who challenged all 'established' morals. In a similar manner, Crowley was very much like another antinomian Oscar Wilde.