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
Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. / MRS. ALLONBY: It ends with Revelations.
There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.
The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.
Children have a natural antipathy to books - handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous.
I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five
My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.
With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
Why was I born with such contemporaries?
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.