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
One's only real life is the life one never leads.
One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one's hearers.
A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position.
The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.
Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization.
I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime.
A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.
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 spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.
I prefer women with a past. They're always so damned amusing to talk to.
Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.
Don't give a woman advice; one should never give a woman anything she can't wear in the evening.