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
There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.
When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim
You are young. No hungry generations tread you down.... The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost...
Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
When I was young, I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old, I know it is
Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination.
If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.
The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
I have a dining room done in different shades of white, with white cushions embroidered in yellow silk: the effect is absolutely delightful and the room beautiful.
Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.