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
The Americans are certainly hero-worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.
The Americans are certainly hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.
The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.
In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.
Indeed, in many respects she was quite English and was an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, the language
I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.
The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.
Nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude
Nothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman - or the want of it in the man
Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman.
A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?