Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)
Irish essayist, novelist, playwright and poet.
Lady Hunstanton: But do you believe all that is written in the newspapers?
Lord Illingworth: I do. Nowadays it is only the unreadable that occurs.
Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?
Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
I have nothing to declare except my genius.
Bigamy is having a wife too many, monogamy is the same.
My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune ... to lose both seems like carelessness.
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
I don't at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.
When a man does exactly what a woman expects him to do she doesn't think much of him. One should always do what a woman doesn't expect, just as one should say what she doesn't understand.
Why, what a wonderful piece of luck! Here is a red rose! I have never seen any rose like it in all my life. It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name.
All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.
They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.
Despite the number of his books and plays, Mr. Wilde was not, I think, what one calls a born writer. His writing seemed always to be rather an overflow of intellectual temperamental energy than an inevitable, absorbing function. That he never concentrated himself on any one form of literature is a proof that the art of writing never really took hold of him.
Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills.