Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wildewas an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 October 1854
CityDublin, Ireland
CountryIreland
You are young. No hungry generations tread you down. The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost
Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris.
Extravagance is the luxury of the poor; penury is the luxury of the rich.
Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.
Newspapers. . . give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details. . .
There is a tiny yellow daffodil, The butterfly can see it from afar, Although one summer evening's dew could fill Its little cup twice over, ere the star Had called the lazy shepherd to his fold, And be no prodigal.
To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.
The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the consequence of its work but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also.
We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone.
Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.
In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.
While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.
The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.
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.