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
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life
Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties.
Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.
I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.
I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.
I drink to separate my body from my soul.
A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.
To look at a thing is very different from seeing it.
For one moment our lives met, our souls touched.
It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
To be in love is to surpass one's self.
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.