Book detail: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde is a definitive compilation of the renowned author's writings. It features a diverse array of Wilde's creative output, showcasing his talent across various literary genres. The collection includes his plays such as "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "Lady Windermere's Fan", his poetic works, short stories, and a selection of his essays, with a special inclusion of the poignant letter De Profundis, which he wrote from prison.
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“We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“However, I think anything is better than high intellectual pressure. That is the most unbecoming thing there is. It makes the noses of the young girls so particularly large.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“This ghastly state of things is what you call Bunburying, I suppose? Algernon. Yes, and a perfectly wonderful Bunbury it is. The most wonderful Bunbury I have ever had in my life. Jack. Well, you've no right whatsoever to Bunbury here. Algernon. That is absurd. One has a right to Bunbury anywhere one chooses. Every serious Bunburyist knows that.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“There was purification in punishment. Not 'Forgive us our sins,' but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of a man to a most just God.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women. It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“Far away beyond the pine-woods,' he answered, in a low dreamy voice, 'there is a little garden. There the grass grows long and deep, there are the great white stars of the hemlock flower, there the nightingale sings all night long. All night long he sings, and the cold, crystal moon looks down, and the yew-tree spreads out its giant arms over the sleepers.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“You can't possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It's absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“You can have your secret as long as I have your heart[.]”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“I don't at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people's toes.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“There are few things easier than to live badly and die well.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis