Oscar Wilde Quotes

was an Irish writer and poet

I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in my life. It's not hard to get the ideas when they come. They just come... it's painful waiting for them. Life is like a box of terrible analogies... If it is not nailed to the floor, it's mine. If I can pry it loose, it is not nailed down. Men as a rule love with their eyes, woman with their ears. When I had to fill in my immigration papers, I gave my age as 19, and my profession as genius; I added that I had nothing to declare except my talent. George Moore leads his readers to the latrine and locks them in. When I see a spade, I call it a spade. I'm glad to say I have never seen a spade. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use it. It's the only thing he's fit for. Be moderate in all things, including moderation. The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar. Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne. It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes. There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not. America is not a country, it is a world. I wonder that no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes. In one dancing saloon 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.' America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle. The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed. Everybody in American seems in a rush to catch a train. The beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance . . . living on the memory of crushing defeats Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead. I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean. It's either the wallpaper or me. One of us has to go. [These were his dying words.] Just to let you know that the buffet car will be closing for stocktaking in five minutes. The next station stop is Chesterfield. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one's neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says. The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices. 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. 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.

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