Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)
Irish essayist, novelist, playwright and poet.
The supreme vice is shallowness.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Moderation is a fatal thing, Lady Hunstanton. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.
Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.
For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.
Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
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.
An Assyrian wax statue, effeminate, but with the vitality of twenty men.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
My dear fellow, the truth isn't quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.
Lord Illingworth: Women have become too brilliant. Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humour in the woman.
Mrs. Allonby: Or the want of it in the man.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.