Oscar Wilde Quotes

Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? 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, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not-there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, terrible courage. I had that courage.

~ Oscar Wilde

Damn it all, MacMurrough, are you telling me you are an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?’‘If you mean am I Irish, the answer is yes.

~ Jamie O'neill

Do you want to kill his love for you? What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great political career, if you close the doors of public life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success? Women are not meant to judge us but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission. Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew himself? A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A women's life revolves around curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that man's life progresses. Don't make any terrible mistake, Lady Chiltern. A woman who can keep a man's love, and love him in return, has done all the world wants of women, or should want of them.

~ Oscar Wilde

The pure and simple truth is, the truth is never pure and simple.

~ Oscar Wilde

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

~ Oscar Wilde

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.Vice and virtue are the artist’s materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feelings, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectators, and not life, that art really mirrors.

~ Oscar Wilde

He was a man of most subtle and refined intellect. A man of culture, charm, and distinction. One of the most intellectual men I ever met.I prefer a gentlemanly fool any day. There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally I have a great admiration for stupidity. It is a sort of fellow-feeling, I suppose.

~ Oscar Wilde

The optimist sees the doughnut but the pessimist see 452 calories and a shed load of sugar ...

~ James Minter

All the quips in the world couldn’t prevent Oscar Wilde from becoming a lovesick fool.

~ David Levithan

... Likewise, Oscar Wilde asked an English journalist to look over 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' before publication: Will you also look after my 'wills' and 'shalls' in proof. I am Celtic in my use of these words, not English. Wilde's novel upset virtually every code of late Victorian respectability, but he had to get his modal auxiliaries just right.

~ Andrew Elfenbein

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. a

~ Oscar Wilde

The drawback of stealing a thing, is that one never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is.

~ Oscar Wilde

You dislike Basil because, without his art, his life is horribly plain. Unlike Dorian who has made an art out of his life. Basil produces art; Dorian consumes it and lets it overwhelm him.

~ Abed Yaman

Marriage is a matter for common sense.But women who have common sense are so curiously plain, father, aren't they? Of course I only speak from heresay?No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex.

~ Oscar Wilde

Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.

~ Oscar Wilde

WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made — the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.)

~ Tom Stoppard

Oh bless Speranza, for giving her son such a preposterous name as Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

~ Mary Ann Shaffer

To lose one parent might be considered a misfortune, or a reason to deny God’s existence at the least. To lose two looks like He may be up to something.

~ Johnny Rich

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

~ Oscar Wilde

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (this excerpt inspired my book, The Persecution of Mildred Dunlap. Wilde wrote it to his lover while in prison.)When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realizing what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

~ Paulette Mahurin

Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly.

~ Oscar Wilde