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
I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.
If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.
The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away.
The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet’s dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.
For, try as we may, we cannot get behind the appearence of things to reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in the things apart from their appearences.
God's eternal laws are kind-and break the heart of stone.
The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one's own perfection, to make one's every dream a reality.
The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.
If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.
The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.
I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.