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
Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.
Oh, why will parents always appear at the wrong time? Some extraordinary mistake in nature, I suppose.
If we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it.
He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.
I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.
Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men.
It is always worth while asking a question, though it is not always worth while answering one.
Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you.
It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.
The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Tsǔ spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things.
Lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance — And must I lose a soul's inheritance?
God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.
Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They’re the only things we can pay.