Oscar Wilde

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.

Time is a waste of money.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm.

Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.

In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.... The Japanese people are ... simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.

Alas! it is a fearful thing<br />To feel another's guilt!

And thus we rust Life's iron chain<br />Degraded and alone:<br />And some men curse, and some men weep,<br />And some men make no moan:<br />But God's eternal Laws are kind<br />And break the heart of stone

Though one can dine in New York, one could not dwell there.

Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.

Like strange mechanical grotesques,<br />Making fantastic arabesques,<br />The shadows raced across the blind.

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate--not to the artist but to the public.... Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but at present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public to judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but by the way he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of his income and a poet by the colour of his necktie.

In his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded....He stands apart, and the chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by, Philosophy will take note of him.

We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon werage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago.

The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.

St. Paul's<br />Loomed like a bubble o'er the town.

one pale woman all alone,<br />The daylight kissing her wan hair,<br />Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare,<br />With lips of flame and heart of stone.

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand,<br />For I am drowning in a stormier sea<br />Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee

An entirely new factor has appeared in the social development of the country, and this factor is the Irish-American, and his influence. To mature its powers, to concentrate its action, to learn the secret of its own strength and of England's weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic. At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a strange land it realised what indomitable forces nationality possesses. What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish: America and Ameri

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.

The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.

More women grow old nowadays through the faithfulness of their admirers than through anything else.

Philanthropy [has become] simply the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures.

It is curious how vanity helps the successful man and wrecks the failure.

The answers are all out there, we just need to ask the right questions.

Cats are put on earth to remind us that not everything has a purpose.

It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.

I should have remembered that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals.