Oscar Wilde Quotes - Page 69

• You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter - a girl brought up with the utmost care - to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?

  Oscar Wilde

  Girl, Daughter, Dream

  Oscar Wilde (1899). “The Importance of Being Earnest”, p.39

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• A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime.

  Oscar Wilde

  Funny, Humor, Punishment

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated)”, p.1649, Delphi Classics

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• It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing

  Oscar Wilde

  Funny, Women, Stupid

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “Wilde Complete Plays: Lady Windermere's Fan; An Ideal Husband; The Importance of Being Earnest; A Woman of No Importance; Salome; The Duchess of Padua; Vera, or the Nihilists; A Florentine Tragedy; La Sainte Courtisane”, p.61, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people's toes.

  Oscar Wilde

  People, Corn, Toes

  Oscar Wilde (1997). “Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis”, p.355, Wordsworth Editions

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• Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Nature, Voice

  Oscar Wilde, Moira Muldoon (2005). “The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings”, p.145, Simon and Schuster

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• The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

  Oscar Wilde

  Feelings, Inferiority, Consciousness

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.356, Wordsworth Editions

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• It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institutions of private property.

  Oscar Wilde

  Order, Evil, Use

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.1034, GENERAL PRESS

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• I played with an idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air; transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox.

  Oscar Wilde

  Air, Ideas, Fancy

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• What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence.

  Oscar Wilde

  Men, Innocence, Admire

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “Aphorisms”, p.14, Oscar Wilde

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• In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Art, Home

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “A Critic in Pall Mall: Being Extracts from Reviews and Miscellanies”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

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• I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

  Oscar Wilde

  Eye, Men, Blue

  The Ballad of Reading Gaol pt. 1, st. 3 (1898)

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• 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.

  Oscar Wilde

  Marriage, Husband, Men

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.62, University of Chicago Press

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• Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.

  Oscar Wilde

  Media, News, May

  1889 'The Decay of Lying', first published in the Nineteenth Century Review.

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• The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Atheism, Age

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated)”, p.1618, Delphi Classics

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• What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one's death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That's all that can be said about land.

  Oscar Wilde

  Home, Land, Giving

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “The Importance of Being Earnest: Revised Edition”, p.27, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Yes, I am a thorough republican. No other form of government is so favorable to the growth of art.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Government, Growth

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• Lots of people act well, but few people talk well. This shows that talking is the more difficult of the two.

  Oscar Wilde

  Talking, Two, People

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• There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.

  Oscar Wilde

  Country, America, Lovely

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.7, University of Chicago Press

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• It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.

  Oscar Wilde

  Dog, Artist, Tragedy

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.824, GENERAL PRESS

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• No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.

  Oscar Wilde

  Book, Men, Criticism

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• The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the consequence of its work but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also.

  Oscar Wilde

  Men, Evil, Machines

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• To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.

  Oscar Wilde

  Running, Modern Life, Danger

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “Aphorisms”, p.16, Oscar Wilde

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• Newspapers. . . give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details. . .

  Oscar Wilde

  Giving, Facts, Details

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.697, GENERAL PRESS

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• Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. Life makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.

  Oscar Wilde

  Secret, Cost, Pay

  Oscar Wilde (1930). “The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Importance of Being Earnest ; The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Works of Oscar Wilde”

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• It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.

  Oscar Wilde

  Unjust, One Love, Difficult

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “Aphorisms”, p.32, Oscar Wilde

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