Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable. Oscar Wilde Read Quote
It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes. Oscar Wilde Read Quote
Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire. Oscar Wilde Read Quote
The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart. Oscar Wilde Read Quote
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us. Oscar Wilde Read Quote
In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth. Oscar Wilde Read Quote
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don’t know. Oscar Wilde Read Quote
