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
No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.
Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature it requires, in fact, that nature of a true Individualist to sympathize with a friend's success.
It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.
The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not its growth and development.
It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.
Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.
A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.
The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.
When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
Work is a refuge of people who have nothing better to do.
The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.
Where there is no extravagance there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.