Wilde Quotes

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Critic As Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything

“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”
― Oscar Wilde

“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.”
― Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

“The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realize through that sin his true perfection.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“I must say... that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am the prince of procrastination. It is my besetting sin. I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance

“Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.  What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.”
― Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

“Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates Individualism. But that is not to trouble them. They are to be calm and self-centred. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.”
― Oscar Wilde, Der Sozialismus und die Seele des Menschen

“Praise makes me humble, but when I am abused, I know that I have touched the stars.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder: A Mystery

“The ages live in history through their anachronisms.”
― Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

“Olvidar un hecho, es modificar el pasado.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Nossos dias são muito curtos para que tomemos, nos próprios ombros, o peso dos erros de outrem. Cada um vive a própria vida, e paga o preço de vivê-la. Em tudo, a única pena é que, com frequência, temos que pagar um preço alto por uma única falta. E, na verdade, estamos sempre a pagar. No trato com o homem, o Destino jamais encerra as contas.Há momentos, dizem-nos os psicólogos, quando a paixão pelo pecado, ou por aquilo que o mundo chama de pecado, domina de tal maneira uma personalidade, que toda fibra do corpo, e toda célula do cérebro, parece ser instinto com impulsos receosos. Nestes momentos, homens e mulheres perdem a liberdade da vontade. Como autômatos, consciência, morta, ou então, se conseguir viver, vive apenas para dar fascínio à revolta, e encanto a desobediência. Pois todos os pecados, como não se cansam de nos lembrar os teólogos, são pecados da desobediência. Quando, dos céus, cai o espírito maior, a estrela matutina do mal, é como rebelde que cai.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do,—and natures like his can realise it.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“There is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of a young Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own shoulders the burden of the entire world; all that had already been done and suffered, and all that was yet to be done and suffered: the sins of Nero, of Caesar Borgia, of Alexander VI., and of him who was Emperor of Rome and Priest of the Sun: the sufferings of those whose names are legion and whose dwelling is among the tombs: oppressed nationalities, factory children, thieves, people in prison, outcasts, those who are dumb under oppression and whose silence is heard only of God; and not merely imagining this but actually achieving it, so that at the present moment all who come in contact with his personality, even though they may neither bow to his altar nor kneel before his priest, in some way find that the ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their sorrow revealed to them.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“People used to say of me that I was too individualistic. I must be far more of an individualist than ever I was. I must get far more out of myself than ever I got, and ask far less of the world than ever I asked. Indeed, my ruin came not from too great individualism of life, but from too little. The one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life was to allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him, Basil,' cried Dorian, with a wild gesture of despair.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you. It will always worship you. You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Me hizo ver lo que era la vida, y lo que significa la muerte; y por qué el amor es más fuerte que ambas.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost

“Those whom he saved from their sins are saved simply for beautiful moments in their lives.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“El mundo llama inmorales a los libros que le explican su propia vergüenza.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The power of the mind over reality was expressed in a different way by Oscar Wilde, who called Pater's Studies in the Renaissance his 'golden book' and yet did not himself write poetic art criticism. Wilde is deceptive: his gifts for paradox and aphorism and the absence of philosophical reference points mask the radicality of his thought. Wilde identified the destination of Fiedler's and Hildebrand's doctrines, for once art is no longer evaluated by comparison to nature, there are no limits to the critic's power to shape the evolution of art. In Wilde's dialogue of 1890, 'The True Function and Value of Criticism,' the straight man Ernest contends that 'the Greeks had no art-critics': 'By the Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses, bringing provincialism to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth. By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the industrious prattle of what they do not understand.' The ironist Gilbert, who speaks for Wilde, contradicts him:
I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about painters quite as much as people do now-adays, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their art-historians, and their archæologists, and all the rest of it.
According to Gilbert, the Greeks were in fact 'a nation of art-critics.' The critic is the one who filters art and literature through a sensibility and a prose style. The critic, for Gilbert and Wilde (and Pater), is anything but a parasite on art. The critic only completes the work of repetition and combination begun by the artist: 'I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer to Æschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already added.' Art is secondary from the start. The artist is a critic, for does he not also dominate nature with his subjectivity, which has already been shaped by art? 'The very landscape that Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“This was Wilde's way of closing the gap between art and life. In Europe, art had been stripped of its central role in religious ritual and public life. Most nineteenth-century churches were outfitted with nineteenth century paintings. But the best nineteenth-century painters had no interest in painting for churches. The modern painter was on his own. The illusions of art were exposed to be the pitiless reasonings of commerce and engineering. The artist, dependent on the historians and critics, the authors of immortality, could only hope that his works would find refuge, one day, in the museum. Wilde understands that it is the writers who patrol the frontier between art and life. He strikes back against modern naturalism or realism by arguing that reality itself is generated by a combinatory artistic creativity. Art colonizes life. If life itself is already a work of art, then the artist will never find himself on the outside of life.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“In mocking the modern business of art, including historical scholar ship, Wilde was striking back, as Nietzsche had done almost thirty years earlier, against the great accumulated pile of writing that loaded the burden of the past on the back of the present. The weight of learning in 1890 seems light when one struggles today, deep in the stacks of of an art-history library housing half a millions volumes, to part the mobile shelves creaking on their runners. Wilde's solution was economical. Both the judgment of value in the present and the shaping of a narrative pf the past would be entrusted to the critic. Historiography is reborn inside the critic's project, and so redeemed.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History