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
Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.
The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.
Thinking is wonderful, but the experience is even more wonderful.
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard Some do it with a bitter look Some with a flattering word The coward does it with a kiss The brave man with a sword
Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. The past, the present and the future are but one moment in the sight of God, in whose sight we should try to live. Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought. The imagination can transcend them.
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.
When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.