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

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
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.

Beauty
Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.
Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
... Nature, whose sweet rains fall of just and unjust alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undetected. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
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.
I sometimes think that God, in creating man, overestimated His ability.
The English country gentleman galloping after a fox -- the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
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.
The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture, and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
The basis for optimism is sheer terror.
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Action is the last refuge of those who cannot dream.
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
Oscar Wilde: "I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar; you will.
Experience...is simply the name we give our mistakes.

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