Oscar Wilde Quotes on Society
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And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
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I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
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To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
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There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
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The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
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Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.
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Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.
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When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
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To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
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I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not.
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The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.
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I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy.
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Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?
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In married life, three is company, and two is none.
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It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
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Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
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The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not?
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I hope you're not leading a double life, pretending to be wicked while being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
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Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that.
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Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
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Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
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The only possible society is oneself.
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Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
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In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.
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I know not whether Laws be right, Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long.
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The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in man That wastes and withers there; Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate And the Warder is Despair.
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Bigamy is having a wife too many, monogamy is the same.
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One of the requisites of sanity is to disagree with the majority of the British public.
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Why was I born with such contemporaries?