Authors
Oscar Wilde
1854 – 1900
Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer famous for his witty plays, clever sayings, and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. At Oxford he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry and graduated with top honors in classics. His play The Importance of Being Earnest is still regarded as one of the greatest comedies ever written for the English stage. He loved to turn ordinary sentences upside down to make people laugh and think at the same time. He remains one of the most quoted writers in the English language.
Quotes
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
“'Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.”
“I have many beautiful flowers, but the children are the most beautiful flowers of all.”
“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
“I must learn how to be happy.”
“All art is quite useless.”
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.”
“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend's success.”
“Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust. Lily-like, white as snow, She hardly knew She was a woman, so Sweetly she grew. Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast, I vex my heart alone She is at rest. Peace, Peace, she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet, All my life's buried here, Heap earth upon it.”
“I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.”
“I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
“I adore you. But you haven’t proposed to me yet. Nothing has been said at all about marriage. The subject has not even been touched on.”
“I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. Which do you know?”
“I don’t think that you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly. Hopelessly doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?”
“But I do not approve of mercenary marriages. When I married Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any kind. But I never dreamed for a moment of allowing that to stand in my way.”
“To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.”
“I am not punctual myself, I know, but I do like punctuality in others, and waiting, even to be married, is quite out of the question.”
“We have married perfect husbands, and we are well punished for it.”
“But no man should have a secret from his own wife. She invariably finds it out.”
“My dear father, if I am to get married, surely you will allow me to choose the time, place, and person? Particularly the person.”
“My dear father, if we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it.”
“An ideal husband! Oh, I don’t think I should like that. It sounds like something in the next world.”
“It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.”
“I used to think ambition the great thing. It is not. Love is the great thing in the world. There is nothing but love, and I love her.”
“Oh, my ambition! I have none now, but that we two may love each other.”
“Loveless marriages are horrible. But there is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage. A marriage in which there is love, but on one side only; faith, but on one side only; devotion, but on one side only, and in which of the two hearts one is sure to be broken.”
“It is love, Robert. Love, and only love. For both of us a new life is beginning.”
“At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.”
“All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery.”
“Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition.”
“Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”
“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”
“Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.”
“It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.”