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
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate.
It is only very ugly or very beautiful women who ever hide their faces .
Imagination is imitative-the real innovation lies in criticism.
Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid.
The only way to even approach doing something perfectly is through experience, and experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
There is only good art and mediocre art.
Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.
Nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know good in anything until you have torn the heart out of it by excess.
The Americans are identical to the British in all respects except, of course, language.
The sin was mine; I did not understand. So now is music prisoned in her cave, Save where some ebbing desultory wave Frets with its restless whirls this meagre strand...
Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. ... For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.
But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never more return? Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory.