Oscar Wilde Quotes
20 quotes from Oscar Wilde — Irish playwright, poet, and wit..
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
“I can resist everything except temptation.”
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
“I have nothing to declare except my genius.”
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”
“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.”
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
“My idea of happiness is absolute power over men's minds, even if accompanied by chronic toothache. My idea of misery would be living a poor and respectable life in an obscure village.”
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
“To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”
“What is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a mode of thought that one cannot express? The artist is never morbid. He expresses everything.”
“My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realization. That is all I am concerned with. And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world.”
“It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him.”
“The aim of art is no more to give pleasure than to give pain. The aim of art is to be art. As I said once before, the work of art is to dominate the spectator. The spectator is not to dominate the work of art.”
“Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.”
