Oscar Wilde: Zitate auf Englisch (seite 40)

“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?”

“Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.”

“Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.”

“The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.”

“Charity creates a multitude of sins.”

“Lord Goring: Now I'm gonna give you some good advice.
Mrs. Cheveley: Pray don't. You should never give a woman something she can't wear in the evening”

“She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses," cried the young Student; "but in all my garden there is no red rose.”

“The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.”

“Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.”

“Divorces are made in Heaven.”

“She is not a subject.”

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

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. ”

“Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.”

“Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.”

“I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

“Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”

“For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them.”