Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish author, poet and playwright. After writing in different literary styles throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular and influential dramatists in London in the early 1890s. He was a key figure in the emerging Aestheticism movement of the late 19th century and is regarded by many as the greatest playwright of the Victorian era. Wilde is best known for his Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), his epigrams, plays and bedtime stories for children, as well as his criminal conviction in 1895 for gross indecency for homosexual acts.

Quotes

A woman begins by resisting a man's advances, and ends by blocking his retreat.
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. All art is quite useless.
Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
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.
I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all.
Anybody can sympathise with the suffering of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
Wisdom comes with winters.
I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself and I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a word of what I'm saying.
A man is very apt to complain of the ingratitude of those who have risen far above him.
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.
I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
Chastity is the greatest form of perversion.
...my dear boy, no woman is a genius. They are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
The problem with the common person is that he is so unbearably common!
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It's the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.
The only thing one never regrets are one's mistakes.
A grand passion is the privelege of people who have nothing to do.
She is a peacock in everything but beauty.
Genius is born--not paid.

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