“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“But she is happiest alone. She is happiest alone.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all!”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.
MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“I don't know how to talk.
Oh! 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.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“LORD ILLINGWORTH What do you think she'd do if I kissed her?
MRS ALLONBY Either marry you, or strike you across the face with her glove. What would you do if she struck you across the face with her glove?
LORD ILLINGWORTH Fall in love with her, probably.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“I was wrong. God's law is only Love.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“It was you I thought of all the time, I gave to them the love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“MRS ALLONBY Is she such a mystery?
LORD ILLINGWORTH She is more than a mystery - she is a mood.
MRS ALLONBY Moods don't last.
LORD ILLINGWORTH It is their chief charm.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“Only love can keep anyone alive...”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“MRS ALLONBY I adore them. The clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk.
HESTER I think the stupid people talk a great deal.
MRS ALLONBY Ah, I never listen!”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“But don't you think one can be happy when on is married?
Perfectly happy. But the happiness of a married man, my dear Gerald, depends on the people he has not married.
But if one is in love?
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“You know I have loved him always.
But we are very poor.
Who, being loved, is poor? Oh, no one. I hate my riches. They are a burden...”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“My dear young lady, there was a great deal of truth; I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“MRS. ALLONBY. It is only fair to tell you beforehand he has got no conversation at all.
LADY STUTFIELD. I adore silent men.
MRS ALLONBY. Oh, Ernest isn't silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don't know. I haven't listened to him for years.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“To win back my youth, there is nothing I wouldn't do - except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“The one advantage of playing with fire, Lady Caroline, is that one never gets even singed. It is the people who don't know how to play with it who get burned up.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“MRS ALLONBY Have you tried a good reputation?
LORD ILLINGWORTH It is one of the many annoyances to which I have never been subjected.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. Living, as you all do, on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“LORD ILLINGWORTH. As George Harford I had everything I wanted. Now I have merely everything that other people want, which isn't nearly so pleasant.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
Oscar Wilde
Born place: in Dublin, Ireland
Born date October 16, 1854
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“I know there is a terrible distance between us. But our bodies are made of stardust, and we are hurtling through space and time, toward the most beautiful collision.”
― Lang Leav, quote from The Universe of Us
“We shape each other to be human.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“New steps. That's what it amounted to. The two of them were learning the steps that would bring them together, a dance that would take them into forever. A dance that could be nothing less than God's plan for their lives.”
― Karen Kingsbury, quote from Redemption
“In earlier times, one had an easier conscience about being a person than one does today. People were like cornstalks in a field, probably more violently tossed back and forth by God, hail, fire, pestilence, and war than they are today, but as a whole, as a city, a region, a field, and as to what personal movement was left to the individual stalk – all this was clearly defined and could be answered for. But today responsibility’s center of gravity is not in people but in circumstances. Have we not noticed that experiences have made themselves independent of people? They have gone on the stage, into books, into the reports of research institutes and explorers, into ideological or religious communities, which foster certain kinds of experience at the expense of others as if they are conducting a kind of social experiment, and insofar as experiences are not actually being developed, they are simply left dangling in the air. Who can say nowadays that his anger is really his own anger when so many people talk about it and claim to know more about it than he does? A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings. Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the “I” itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is the experiencing, or of action the doing, is beginning to strike most people as naïve. There are probably people who still lead personal lives, who say “We saw the So-and-sos yesterday” or “We’ll do this or that today” and enjoy it without its needing to have any content of significance. They like everything that comes in contact with their fingers, and are purely private persons insofar as this is at all possible. In contact with such people, the world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow. They may be very happy, but this kind of people usually seems absurd to the others, although it is still not at all clear why.
And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Man Without Qualities: Vol. 1
“Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this—that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments.”
― John Stuart Mill, quote from Utilitarianism
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