The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

Even things that are true can be proved.

Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.

Genie währt länger als Schönheit.

Time is a waste of money.

He discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels. In Alphonso’s Clericalis Disciplina a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander, the Conqueror of Emathia was said to have...

You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories...

To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous...

I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately...

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.

The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.

It’s beauty that captures your attention; personality that captures your heart..

JACK.I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few...

Hearts Live By Being Wounded

To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial...

What a silly thing love is!’ said the student as he walked away. ‘It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things...

When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.

I can’t help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a...

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear...

Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in...

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect by creating, or...

I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.

I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.

The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.

Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid.Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This...

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of...

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.

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

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense...

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid....

Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if...

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical...

I’m a man of simple tastes. I’m always satisfied with the best.

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.

I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.

(…) wartość idei w żaden sposób nie zależy od szczerości tego, kto ją głosi. Wprost przeciwnie; istnieje duże prawdopodobieństwo, że im bardziej jest nieszczery, tym bardziej stanowi ona czysty wytwór jego intelektu, nieskażony jego osobistymi...

Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

I quite agree with Dr. Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.

There is nothing like race, is there?