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
It is only through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; Through Art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.
Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.
If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.
It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.
The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.
The truth is never pure and rarely simple.
It is personalities not principles that move the age.
I can't stand people that do not take food seriously.
I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.
Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.