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.
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.
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
These days man knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly deceived
The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored.
Things last either too long, or not long enough,
The worst form of tyranny the world has ever known the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.
The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork - Oscar Wilde
The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence.