Quotes from Oscar Wilde

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art.

Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.

Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.

My philosophy? I'm always right and you are wrong.

All I want to do now is look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize

The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.

There are two ways of disliking poetry, one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour

Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.

With slouch and swing around the ringWe trod the Fools' Parade!We did not care: we knew we wereThe Devils' Own Brigade:And shaven head and feet of leadMake a merry masquerade.

The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pères ont toujours tort.

Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole!

Cats are put on earth to remind us that not everything has a purpose.

People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.

God's eternal laws are kind-and break the heart of stone.

My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.

God and other artists are always a little obscure.

God, bless me with luxury. Necessities I can do without.

If God really wanted to punish, he'd answer all our prayers.