Oscar Wilde quotes - page 46

Authority is quite degrading. (Oscar Wilde)
How strange a thing this is The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver. View quote
Oscar Wilde
The Governor was strong upon The Regulations Act The Doctor said that Death was but A scientific fact And twice a day the Chaplain called, And left a little tract. View quote
Oscar Wilde
Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. View quote
Oscar Wilde
Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness. View quote
Oscar Wilde
The American father. . . is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher. View quote
Oscar Wilde
On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners. View quote
Oscar Wilde
They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins. View quote
Oscar Wilde
Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon. View quote
Oscar Wilde
The ages live in history through their anachronisms. View quote
Oscar Wilde
The world has been made by fools that men should live in it. (Oscar Wilde)
The people who have adored me-- there have not been very many, but there have been some-- have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me. View quote
Oscar Wilde
There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. View quote
Oscar Wilde
The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable. View quote
Oscar Wilde
Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part. View quote
Oscar Wilde
To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him. View quote
Oscar Wilde
A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain. View quote
Oscar Wilde
They afterwards took me to a dancing saloon where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice- 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.' View quote
Oscar Wilde
He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression... View quote
Oscar Wilde
It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame... View quote
Oscar Wilde
To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. (Oscar Wilde)
It requires one to assume such indecent postures. View quote
Oscar Wilde
Caricature is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius. View quote
Oscar Wilde
The Bostonians take their learning too sadly culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. View quote
Oscar Wilde
Fashion is the method by which the fantastic becomes for a moment universal. View quote
Oscar Wilde