Oscar Wilde Quotes About Shame

• The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

  Oscar Wilde

  Inspirational, Anger, Reading

  The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. 19 (1891)

• Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night.

  Oscar Wilde

  Morning, Eye, Night

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.360, GENERAL PRESS

• Your machinery is beautiful. Your society people have apologized to me for the envious ridicule with which your newspapers have referred to me. Your newspapers are comic but never amusing. Your Water Tower is a castellated monstrosity with pepperboxes stuck all over it. I am amazed that any people could so abuse Gothic art and make a structure not like a water tower but like a tower of a medieval castle. It should be torn down. It is a shame to spend so much money on buildings with such an unsatisfactory result. Your city looks positively dreary.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Art, Cities

• 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.

  Oscar Wilde

  Dream, Memories, Passion

• Every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim.

  Oscar Wilde

  Brother, Men, Bars

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Poems and poems in prose”, p.213, Oxford University Press on Demand

• And once, or twice, to throw the dice is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin in the secret house of shame

  Oscar Wilde

  Winning, Games, Play

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.379, GENERAL PRESS

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