“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“What of Art?
-It is a malady.
--Love?
-An Illusion.
--Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
--You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
--What are you?
-To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Some things are more precious because they don't last long.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Born place: in Dublin, Ireland
Born date October 16, 1854
See more on GoodReads
“From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a clay pigeon, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster.
All the shooters who precede me seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and all get eight out of ten or above. But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds, another two are L. L. Bean-model-type brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various fast-flying species with their "Papa" in southern Canada, and the last has got not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case, but also his own trapshooting range in his backyard (31) in North Carolina. When it's finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else's ear-oil on them and don't fit my head very well. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I'm told is cordite, small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who preceded me and is tied for first with 10/10. The two brothers are the only entrants even near my age; both got scores of 9/10 and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch positions against the starboard rail. The Greek NCOs seem extremely bored. I am handed the heavy gun and told to "be bracing a hip" against the aft rail and then to place the stock of the weapon against, no, not the shoulder of my hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm. (My initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.)
Let's not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out. Let me simply say that, yes, my own trapshooting score was noticeably lower than the other entrants' scores, then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice contemplating trapshooting from a 7NC Megaship, and then we'll move on: (1) A certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause everyone who knows anything about firearms to converge on you all at the same time with cautions and advice and handy tips. (2) A lot of the advice in (1) boils down to exhortations to "lead" the launched pigeon, but nobody explains whether this means that the gun's barrel should move across the sky with the pigeon or should instead sort of lie in static ambush along some point in the pigeon's projected path. (3) Whatever a "hair trigger" is, a shotgun does not have one. (4) If you've never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible. (5) The well-known "kick" of a fired shotgun is no misnomer; it knocks you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling wildly for balance, which when you're holding a still-loaded gun results in mass screaming and ducking and then on the next shot a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the 9-Aft gallery above. Finally, (6), know that an unshot discus's movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like -- i.e., orange and parabolic and right-to-left -- and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
“There was a saying on the island: "[I]t is a pity to spoil a good mate by making him a master.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
“Humanity seems doomed to do more evil than good. The greatest ideal on earth is human love.”
― Władysław Szpilman, quote from The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939–45
“At the Day of Judgement we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done.”
― Thomas à Kempis, quote from The Imitation of Christ
“After all, if you run far enough, no one can catch you.”
― V.E. Schwab, quote from A Gathering of Shadows
With All My Soul
Immortal City
The Postman
Don't Sweat the Smal...
Fe Fi FOE Comes
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
