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
I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.
I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.
When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.
There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.
My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.
She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.
He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.
The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.
A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.
People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.