Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.
View quote | Quotes about Abstinence
Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.
View quote | Quotes about Academia
While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.
View quote | Quotes about Acting and Actors
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
View quote | Quotes about Acting and Actors
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
View quote | Quotes about Acting and Actors
The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.
View quote | Quotes about Acting and Actors
Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
View quote | Quotes about Action
No, Ernest, don't talk about action. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
View quote | Quotes about Action
The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
View quote | Quotes about Advice
Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
View quote | Quotes about Age and Aging
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
View quote | Quotes about Age and Aging
No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
View quote | Quotes about Age and Aging
I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.
View quote | Quotes about Age and Aging
Ambition is the last refuge of failure.
View quote | Quotes about Ambition
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
View quote | Quotes about America
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
View quote | Quotes about America
The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.
View quote | Quotes about America
There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.
View quote | Quotes about America
People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.
View quote | Quotes about Anarchism
The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last.
View quote | Quotes about Anxiety
He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone.
View quote | Quotes about Aphorisms and Epigrams
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
View quote | Quotes about Appearance
Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
View quote | Quotes about Argument
I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.
View quote | Quotes about Argument
You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.
View quote | Quotes about Aristocracy
In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
View quote | Quotes about Arts and Artists
Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One
View quote | Quotes about Arts and Artists
No great artist ever sees things as they really are, if he did he would cease to be an artist.
View quote | Quotes about Arts and Artists
Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.
View quote | Quotes about Arts and Artists
Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
View quote | Quotes about Arts and Artists
All art is quite useless.
View quote | Quotes about Arts and Artists
Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.
View quote | Quotes about Arts and Artists
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
View quote | Quotes about Attitude
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
View quote | Quotes about Attitude
I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.
View quote | Quotes about Autobiography
Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.
View quote | Quotes about Bachelor
By persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful.
View quote | Quotes about Bachelor
It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.
View quote | Quotes about Beauty
Beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
View quote | Quotes about Beauty
I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.
View quote | Quotes about Beauty
As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.
View quote | Quotes about Beggars
The old believe everything; the middle aged suspect everything, and the young know everything.
View quote | Quotes about Belief
It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
View quote | Quotes about Bills
Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
View quote | Quotes about Biography
There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.
View quote | Quotes about Blame
The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.
View quote | Quotes about Books - Classics
The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
View quote | Quotes about Books - Reading
There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.
View quote | Quotes about Books - Reading
It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties.
View quote | Quotes about Business
The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
View quote | Quotes about Caprice
Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
View quote | Quotes about Careers
It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
View quote | Quotes about Change
It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.
View quote | Quotes about Character
Charity creates a multitude of sins.
View quote | Quotes about Charity
All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.
View quote | Quotes about Charm
It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
View quote | Quotes about Charm
The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
View quote | Quotes about Children
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
View quote | Quotes about Children
Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.
View quote | Quotes about Children
The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.
View quote | Quotes about Cities and City Life
Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.
View quote | Quotes about Civilization
Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.
View quote | Quotes about Class
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.
View quote | Quotes about Colleges and Universities
The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.
View quote | Quotes about Colleges and Universities
He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.
View quote | Quotes about Color
Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
View quote | Quotes about Color
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
View quote | Quotes about Common Sense
Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the two sexes.
View quote | Quotes about Compliments
It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
View quote | Quotes about Confession
A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.
View quote | Quotes about Confession
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
View quote | Quotes about Consistency
Who is that man over there? I don't know him. What is he doing? Is he a conspirator? Have you searched him? Give him till tomorrow to confess, then hang him! -- hang him!
View quote | Quotes about Conspiracy
The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
View quote | Quotes about Contradiction
Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.
View quote | Quotes about Conversation
Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.
View quote | Quotes about Conversation
To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist -- the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar.
View quote | Quotes about Cooking
Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.
View quote | Quotes about Cries and Crying
The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.
View quote | Quotes about Critics and Criticism
That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.
View quote | Quotes about Critics and Criticism
Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.
View quote | Quotes about Critics and Criticism
On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.
View quote | Quotes about Critics and Criticism
The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
View quote | Quotes about Critics and Criticism
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
View quote | Quotes about Cynics and Cynicism
As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
View quote | Quotes about Daughters
Once can survive everything nowadays, except death.
View quote | Quotes about Death and Dying
Alas, I am dying beyond my means.
View quote | Quotes about Death and Dying
For he who lives more lives than one: More deaths than one must die.
View quote | Quotes about Death and Dying
I am dying beyond my means.
View quote | Quotes about Death and Dying
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
View quote | Quotes about Democracy
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.
View quote | Quotes about Despair
She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
View quote | Quotes about Desperation
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.
View quote | Quotes about Despotism
Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.
View quote | Quotes about Despotism
Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.
View quote | Quotes about Dictators and Dictatorship
Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.
View quote | Quotes about Disciples
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
View quote | Quotes about Discontent
She is absolutely inadmissible into society. Many a woman has a past, but I am told that she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit.
View quote | Quotes about Disgrace
It is he who has broken the bond of marriage -- not I. I only break its bondage.
View quote | Quotes about Divorce
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.
View quote | Quotes about Dreams
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
View quote | Quotes about Dreams
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
View quote | Quotes about Dress
Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.
View quote | Quotes about Dullness
Oh, duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.
View quote | Quotes about Duty
The first duty of life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one as yet discovered.
View quote | Quotes about Duty
The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence.
View quote | Quotes about Education
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
View quote | Quotes about Education
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
View quote | Quotes about Emotions
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
View quote | Quotes about Enemies
Pardon me, you are not engaged to any one. When you do become engaged to some one, I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself.
View quote | Quotes about Engagement
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
View quote | Quotes about Ethics
Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
View quote | Quotes about Evangelism
The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion.
View quote | Quotes about Events
Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.
View quote | Quotes about Examinations
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
View quote | Quotes about Excellence
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
View quote | Quotes about Experience
We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
View quote | Quotes about Experience
An ordinary man away from home giving advice.
View quote | Quotes about Experts
Where there is no extravagance there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.
View quote | Quotes about Extravagance
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
View quote | Quotes about Faces
Misfortunes one can endure -- they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults -- Ah! there is the sting of life.
View quote | Quotes about Failure
I can believe anything provided it is incredible.
View quote | Quotes about Faith
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
View quote | Quotes about Family
I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
View quote | Quotes about Family
And now, I am dying beyond my means. [Sipping champagne on his deathbed]
View quote | Quotes about Famous Last Words
One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.
View quote | Quotes about Fantasy
Woman's first duty in life is to her dressmaker. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.
View quote | Quotes about Fashion
Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.
View quote | Quotes about Fashion
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
View quote | Quotes about Fashion
Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment the universal.
View quote | Quotes about Fashion
The American father is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher.
View quote | Quotes about Fathers
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
View quote | Quotes about Fathers
None of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
View quote | Quotes about Faults
One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.
View quote | Quotes about Fiction
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
View quote | Quotes about Fiction
People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect -- simply a confession of failures.
View quote | Quotes about Fidelity
What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
View quote | Quotes about Fidelity
The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.
View quote | Quotes about Flirting
Flowers are as common in the country as people are in London.
View quote | Quotes about Flowers
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
View quote | Quotes about Food and Eating
Always forgive your enemies -- nothing annoys them so much.
View quote | Quotes about Forgiveness
An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship.
View quote | Quotes about Friends and Friendship
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
View quote | Quotes about Friends and Friendship
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
View quote | Quotes about Function
The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
View quote | Quotes about Future
One should always play fair when one has the winning cards.
View quote | Quotes about Gambling
The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.
View quote | Quotes about Generations
I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
View quote | Quotes about Genius
Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.
View quote | Quotes about Genius
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
View quote | Quotes about Genius
I have nothing to declare except my genius.
View quote | Quotes about Genius
A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude.
View quote | Quotes about Gentlemen
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
View quote | Quotes about Goals
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
View quote | Quotes about Goodness
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
View quote | Quotes about Goodness
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
View quote | Quotes about Gossip
It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one, behind one's back, that are absolutely and entirely true.
View quote | Quotes about Gossip
Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses -- once!
View quote | Quotes about Guests
When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
View quote | Quotes about Happiness
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
View quote | Quotes about Happiness
How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?
View quote | Quotes about Heartbreak
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
View quote | Quotes about History and Historians
Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
View quote | Quotes about History and Historians
Like two doomed ships that pass in storm we had crossed each other's way: but we made no sign, we said no word, we had no word to say.
View quote | Quotes about Hobos
I'm sure I don't know half the people who come to my house. Indeed, from all I hear, I shouldn't like to.
View quote | Quotes about Hospitality
Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.
View quote | Quotes about Housework
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.
View quote | Quotes about Human Nature
In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself.
View quote | Quotes about Human Rights
The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.
View quote | Quotes about Humankind
I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
View quote | Quotes about Humankind
It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.
View quote | Quotes about Humankind
One knows so well the popular idea of health. The English country gentleman galloping after a fox -- the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
View quote | Quotes about Hunting
They are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.
View quote | Quotes about Husbands
The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.
View quote | Quotes about Husbands
The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.
View quote | Quotes about Hypocrisy
How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say.
View quote | Quotes about Hypocrisy
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, none knew so well as I: for he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.
View quote | Quotes about Hypocrisy
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
View quote | Quotes about Ideals and Idealism
Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone.
View quote | Quotes about Ignorance
The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.
View quote | Quotes about Illness
The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.
View quote | Quotes about Illusion
Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.
View quote | Quotes about Imagination
Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
View quote | Quotes about Impossibility
To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.
View quote | Quotes about Inaction
My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.
View quote | Quotes about Individuality
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
View quote | Quotes about Infidelity
Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.
View quote | Quotes about Information
Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.
View quote | Quotes about Innocence
Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.
View quote | Quotes about Intelligence and Intellectuals
The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.
View quote | Quotes about Intelligence and Intellectuals
Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.
View quote | Quotes about Interviews
It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.
View quote | Quotes about Invention and Inventor
With an evening coat and a white tie, anybody, even a stock broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.
View quote | Quotes about Investments
Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.
View quote | Quotes about Jealousy
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.
View quote | Quotes about Journalism and Journalists
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.
View quote | Quotes about Journalism and Journalists
Bad manners make a journalist.
View quote | Quotes about Journalism and Journalists
A kiss may ruin a human life.
View quote | Quotes about Kisses and Kissing
I am not young enough to know everything.
View quote | Quotes about Knowledge
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating --people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
View quote | Quotes about Knowledge
We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
View quote | Quotes about Language
The mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-Ã -brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
View quote | Quotes about Learning
Cultivated leisure is the aim of man.
View quote | Quotes about Leisure
When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.
View quote | Quotes about Liberty
The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.
View quote | Quotes about Lies and Lying
As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.
View quote | Quotes about Lies and Lying
We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.
View quote | Quotes about Life and Living
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
View quote | Quotes about Life and Living
The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.
View quote | Quotes about Life and Living
Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic
View quote | Quotes about Life and Living
Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.
View quote | Quotes about Life and Living
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
View quote | Quotes about Literature
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
View quote | Quotes about Literature
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.
View quote | Quotes about Literature
Yet each man kills the thing he loves from all let this be heard some does it with a bitter look some with a flattering word the coward does it with a kiss the brave man with the sword.
View quote | Quotes about Love
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
View quote | Quotes about Love
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
View quote | Quotes about Love
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
View quote | Quotes about Love
When a man has once loved a woman, he will do anything for her, except continue to love her.
View quote | Quotes about Love Ended
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
View quote | Quotes about Love Ended
There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about.
View quote | Quotes about Lovers
If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
View quote | Quotes about Loyalty
When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
View quote | Quotes about Marriage
Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.
View quote | Quotes about Marriage
They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.
View quote | Quotes about Marriage
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.
View quote | Quotes about Marriage
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.
View quote | Quotes about Marriage
Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which is never advisable.
View quote | Quotes about Marriage
No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.
View quote | Quotes about Martyrdom
My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
View quote | Quotes about Maturity
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.
View quote | Quotes about Media
I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.
View quote | Quotes about Meetings
Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.
View quote | Quotes about Memory
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.
View quote | Quotes about Men
A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
View quote | Quotes about Men and Women
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
View quote | Quotes about Men and Women
The fact is, you have fallen lately, Cecily, into a bad habit of thinking for yourself. You should give it up. It is not quite womanly... men don't like it.
View quote | Quotes about Men and Women
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
View quote | Quotes about Men and Women
What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?
View quote | Quotes about Mind
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
View quote | Quotes about Misers and Misery
There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.
View quote | Quotes about Misfortunes
Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.
View quote | Quotes about Mistakes
Life would be dull without them.
View quote | Quotes about Mistakes
For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.
View quote | Quotes about Models and Modeling
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
View quote | Quotes about Moderation
It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.
View quote | Quotes about Modern and Modernism
When I was young I used to think that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old, I know it is.
View quote | Quotes about Money
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
View quote | Quotes about Money
If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.
View quote | Quotes about Monuments
I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.
View quote | Quotes about Moralists
A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.
View quote | Quotes about Moralists
Morality is the attitude we adopt toward people whom we personally dislike.
View quote | Quotes about Morality
There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.
View quote | Quotes about Morality
Lord Illingworth: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. Mrs. Allonby: No man does. That is his.
View quote | Quotes about Mothers
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
View quote | Quotes about Motives
Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
View quote | Quotes about Murder
Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
View quote | Quotes about Music
Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.
View quote | Quotes about Music
If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.
View quote | Quotes about Music
It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
View quote | Quotes about Names
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
View quote | Quotes about Necessity
It is always the unreadable that occurs.
View quote | Quotes about News
Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.
View quote | Quotes about Newspapers
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
View quote | Quotes about Obedience
The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.
View quote | Quotes about Obscenity
No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.
View quote | Quotes about Opinions
For his mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.
View quote | Quotes about Outcasts
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
View quote | Quotes about Painters and Painting
The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them.
View quote | Quotes about Paradox
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune... to lose both seems like carelessness.
View quote | Quotes about Parents and Parenting
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
View quote | Quotes about Past
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
View quote | Quotes about People, Other
The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
View quote | Quotes about Perfection
The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.
View quote | Quotes about Perfection
A pessimist is one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
View quote | Quotes about Pessimism
Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.
View quote | Quotes about Philanthropists
In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.
View quote | Quotes about Platitudes
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
View quote | Quotes about Plays
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
View quote | Quotes about Plays
Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.
View quote | Quotes about Pleasure
A poet can survive anything but a misprint.
View quote | Quotes about Poetry and Poets
Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.
View quote | Quotes about Politicians and Politics
I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.
View quote | Quotes about Politicians and Politics
He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.
View quote | Quotes about Politicians and Politics
Popularity is the only insult that has not yet been offered to Mr. Whistler.
View quote | Quotes about Popularity
Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.
View quote | Quotes about Popularity
Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
View quote | Quotes about Portraits
Who, being loved, is poor?
View quote | Quotes about Poverty and The Poor
As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.
View quote | Quotes about Poverty and The Poor
In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.
View quote | Quotes about Poverty and The Poor
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
View quote | Quotes about Prayer
One can only give an unbiased opinion about things that do not interest one, which is no doubt the reason an unbiased opinion is always valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.
View quote | Quotes about Prejudice
He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.
View quote | Quotes about Present
In America, the President reigns for four years, and journalism governs for ever and ever.
View quote | Quotes about President
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
View quote | Quotes about Principles
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
View quote | Quotes about Prison
I know not whether Laws be right or whether Laws be wrong; all that we know who live in goal is that the wall is strong; and that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
View quote | Quotes about Prison
There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.
View quote | Quotes about Professions and Professionals
Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.
View quote | Quotes about Progress
If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.
View quote | Quotes about Property
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.
View quote | Quotes about Property
The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.
View quote | Quotes about Psychoanalysis
Yes; the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
View quote | Quotes about Public
The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.
View quote | Quotes about Public
Public Opinion... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.
View quote | Quotes about Public Opinion
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.
View quote | Quotes about Publishing and Publishers
He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
View quote | Quotes about Punctuality
Punctuality is the thief of time. Wilde I never travel without my diary. One should always have Something sensational to read in the train.
View quote | Quotes about Punctuality
One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
View quote | Quotes about Punishment
The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.
View quote | Quotes about Purity
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
View quote | Quotes about Quotations
I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
View quote | Quotes about Reality
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
View quote | Quotes about Reason
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
View quote | Quotes about Religion
Yes, I am a thorough republican. No other form of government is so favorable to the growth of art.
View quote | Quotes about Republican
One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything except a good reputation.
View quote | Quotes about Reputation
Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. They a
View quote | Quotes about Respectability
The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.
View quote | Quotes about Respectability
He rides in the row at ten o clock in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night of the season. You don't call that leading an idle life, do you?
View quote | Quotes about Riches
To love oneself is the beginning of a life long romance.
View quote | Quotes about Romance and Romanticism
Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.
View quote | Quotes about Romance and Romanticism
He must have a truly romantic nature, for he weeps when there is nothing at all to weep about.
View quote | Quotes about Romance and Romanticism
Men always want to be a woman's first love. Women have a more subtle instinct: What they like is to be a man's last romance.
View quote | Quotes about Romance and Romanticism
Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman.
View quote | Quotes about Romance and Romanticism
There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.
View quote | Quotes about Royalty
It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
View quote | Quotes about Saints
The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.
View quote | Quotes about Sales
Scandal: gossip made tedious by morality.
View quote | Quotes about Scandal
One should never make one's debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age.
View quote | Quotes about Scandal
Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
View quote | Quotes about Scandal
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
View quote | Quotes about Security
Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
View quote | Quotes about Self-expression
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.
View quote | Quotes about Self-interest
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
View quote | Quotes about Senses
A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people's toes.
View quote | Quotes about Sensitivity
A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.
View quote | Quotes about Sentiment
Life is too important to be taken seriously.
View quote | Quotes about Seriousness
He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.
View quote | Quotes about Silence
The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are very difficult to interpret (understand). Great passion are for the great of souls. Great events can only be seen by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.
View quote | Quotes about Simplicity
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
View quote | Quotes about Simplicity
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
View quote | Quotes about Sin
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colorless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.
View quote | Quotes about Sin
There is no sin except stupidity.
View quote | Quotes about Sin
The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret.
View quote | Quotes about Sin
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
View quote | Quotes about Sincerity
Skepticism is the beginning of Faith.
View quote | Quotes about Skepticism
I never saw a man who looked with such a wistful eye upon that little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky.
View quote | Quotes about Sky
What is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.
View quote | Quotes about Slander
The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
View quote | Quotes about Slavery
A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?
View quote | Quotes about Smoking
To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.
View quote | Quotes about Socializing and Socialism
When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.
View quote | Quotes about Socializing and Socialism
Never speak disrespectfully of Society. Only people who can't get into it do that.
View quote | Quotes about Society
Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.
View quote | Quotes about Society
Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
View quote | Quotes about Sorrow
How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.
View quote | Quotes about Soul
Lots of people act well, but few people talk well. This shows that talking is the more difficult of the two.
View quote | Quotes about Speakers and Speaking
Talk to a woman as if you loved her, and to a man as if he bored you.
View quote | Quotes about Speakers and Speaking
The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.
View quote | Quotes about State
The greatest of all sins is stupidity.
View quote | Quotes about Stupidity
The only thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them.
View quote | Quotes about Stupidity
While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first is personality, which no one should copy; the second is perfection, which all should aim at.
View quote | Quotes about Style
Nothing succeeds like success.
View quote | Quotes about Success
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
View quote | Quotes about Suffering
I can sympathize with everything, except suffering.
View quote | Quotes about Suffering
Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.
View quote | Quotes about Sun
There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
View quote | Quotes about Superstition
There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the color, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
View quote | Quotes about Sympathy
Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.
View quote | Quotes about Sympathy
To have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact, talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you.
View quote | Quotes about Tact and Tactfulness
I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments.
View quote | Quotes about Talkativeness
Good taste is the excuse I have given for leading such a bad life.
View quote | Quotes about Taste
Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art.
View quote | Quotes about Taste
Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
View quote | Quotes about Taxes and Taxation
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
View quote | Quotes about Teachers and Teaching
Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
View quote | Quotes about Teachers and Teaching
Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music -- his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting -- that which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and all modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.
View quote | Quotes about Techniques
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act according with the dictates of reason.
View quote | Quotes about Temper
I can resist everything except temptation.
View quote | Quotes about Temptation
Do you really think, Arthur, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to.
View quote | Quotes about Temptation
Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.
View quote | Quotes about Temptation
The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
View quote | Quotes about Theater
Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.
View quote | Quotes about Thoughts and Thinking
Time is waste of money.
View quote | Quotes about Time and Time Management
In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst.
View quote | Quotes about Tragedies
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.
View quote | Quotes about Tragedies
I was disappointed in Niagara -- most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.
View quote | Quotes about Travel and Tourism
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.
View quote | Quotes about Travel and Tourism
All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.
View quote | Quotes about Trials
One should never trust a woman who tells her real age. If she tells that, she'll tell anything.
View quote | Quotes about Trust
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
View quote | Quotes about Truth
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
View quote | Quotes about Truth
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
View quote | Quotes about Truth
The worst form of tyranny the world has ever known the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.
View quote | Quotes about Tyranny
The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.
View quote | Quotes about Ugliness
Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
View quote | Quotes about Value
Whatever harsh criticisms may be passed on the construction of her sentences, she at least possesses that one touch of vulgarity that makes the whole world kin.
View quote | Quotes about Vulgarity
Vulgarity is the conduct of other people, just as falsehoods are the truths of other people.
View quote | Quotes about Vulgarity
Vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people.
View quote | Quotes about Vulgarity
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have it's fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
View quote | Quotes about War
She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
View quote | Quotes about Weakness
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
View quote | Quotes about Wealth
Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
View quote | Quotes about Wealth
Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else.
View quote | Quotes about Weather
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attraction of others.
View quote | Quotes about Wickedness
As a wicked man I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back.
View quote | Quotes about Wickedness
London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognize them. They look so thoroughly unhappy.
View quote | Quotes about Wives
Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.
View quote | Quotes about Women
There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.
View quote | Quotes about Women
The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored.
View quote | Quotes about Women
Work is the curse of the drinking class.
View quote | Quotes about Work
Work is a refuge of people who have nothing better to do.
View quote | Quotes about Work
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.
View quote | Quotes about Writers and Writing
From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
View quote | Quotes about Writers and Writing
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
View quote | Quotes about Writers and Writing
Those whom the gods love grow young.
View quote | Quotes about Youth
In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
View quote | Quotes about Youth
Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile.
View quote | Quotes about Youth