Quote

The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.

Oscar Wilde

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Oscar Wilde
Age: 46 †
Born: 1854
Born: October 16
Died: 1900
Died: November 30
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Oscar O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
States
Make
Useful
State
Individual
Beautiful

More quotes by Oscar Wilde

Image
Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men.
Oscar Wilde
Image
LADY STUTFIELD I adore silent men. MRS ALLONBY Oh, Ernest isn't silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don't know. I haven't listened to him for years.
Oscar Wilde
Image
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.
Oscar Wilde
Image
The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.
Oscar Wilde
Image
To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Beauty ...is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
Oscar Wilde
Image
The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar.
Oscar Wilde
Image
The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.
Oscar Wilde
Image
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.
Oscar Wilde
Image
As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.
Oscar Wilde
Image
If we're always guided by other people's thoughts, what's the point in having our own?
Oscar Wilde
Image
It is a much cleverer thing to talk nonsense than to listen to it.
Oscar Wilde
Image
If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.
Oscar Wilde
Image
It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.
Oscar Wilde
Image
To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life.
Oscar Wilde
Image
It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. 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
Image
The morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
Oscar Wilde