"Oscar Wilde" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I was much interested in the accounts of her early life and experiences in Ireland, and I especially recall many things she told me concerning the members of the Wilde family, with whom she had been quite intimately associated. I learned from her that Oscar Wilde inherited his aesthetic tastes largely from his mother. She was a woman of unusual type and habitually dressed in white—at a time, too, before white garments had become so generally prevalent. I was also told that Oscar Wilde's father was an oculist of some prominence, ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... Oscar Wilde, the unhappy poet, has produced a wonderful piece of literature in his treatment of {497} the brutal facts connected with Salome's dance and ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... exile,—for his offense against Sir Thomas Lucy, aggravated by poetical temperament. [Footnote: See Wm. Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher, a drama (1904).] Of all renaissance poets Dante [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, Dante; Sarah King Wiley, Dante and Beatrice; Rossetti, Dante at Verona; Oscar Wilde, Ravenna.] and Tasso [Footnote: Byron, The Lament of Tasso; Shelley, Song for Tasso; James Thomson, B. V., Tasso to Leonora.] have received most attention on account of their wrongs. [Footnote: The sufferings of several French poets are commented ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... "Salome," Oscar Wilde makes a mistaken appeal to France, His necrophilism welcomed by Richard Strauss and Berlin, Conried's efforts to produce "Salome" at the Metropolitan Opera Blouse suppressed, Hammerstein produces the ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of making "maxims," axiomata, encouraged the enlivenment of conversation by the introduction of topsy-turvy statements, such as "Constancy is merely inconstancy arrested," in the manner of Oscar Wilde and Mr. Chesterton.] ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... Hunt and Millais. These latter soon left Rossetti far behind in execution; but Rossetti was the soul of the movement. He had received his inspiration directly from Ruskin. Among the reminiscences of this art movement are Oscar Wilde and the esthetes of London to-day, with their "symphonies" in blue and their "arrangements" in yellow, and the hideous females who go about London drawing-rooms in limp dresses of sulphur color and sage green loosely hanging from their shoulders, after the ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... another question! Do they? that is all the novelist needs to know. Did you ever read Ouida's 'Sigma?' There are the two sisters, one as pure as can be, the other quite the opposite, and the beauty belongs to the depraved one. I know Oscar Wilde takes a different view in 'Dorian Grey,' but he is wrong. I am sure that the worst man or woman in the world—reckoning by what are called the 'amiable vices'—might be the most lovely to look upon, the most delightful to associate with. Eve ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... the genius of Milton, supreme artist plus supreme moralist, the Puritans managed somehow to force into the common mind an antagonism between Beauty and Morality which persists even unto this day. There is no reason why those two contemporaries, Oscar Wilde and the Rev. Charles H. Spurgeon, should stand before the London public as the champions of contending armies; for Beauty is an end in itself, not a means, and so ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... if he even takes a "work of art" and a "work of art for art's sake" as synonymous. Nothing, in fact, could be more inartistic. "Art for art's sake" is one species of art, whose right to existence the author has amply recognised in other works. (The King of Schnorrers was even read aloud by Oscar Wilde to a duchess.) But he roundly denies that art is any the less artistic for being inspired by life, and seeking in its turn to inspire life. Such a contention is tainted by the very Philistinism it would repudiate, since it seeks a negative test of art in something outside ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... and in nearly every instance overfeeding is the cause. Statistics show that about one-fifth of the babies born die before they are one year old. In nearly every instance the parents are to blame. One's intentions may be good, but good intentions coupled with wrong actions are deadly to infants. Oscar Wilde wrote, "We kill the thing we love." Parental love too often takes the form of indulging them and so it happens that hundreds of thousands of little ones are placed in ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... been at College during that bright brief period of the attempted apotheosis of the dirty-minded little Decadent whose stock in trade was a few Aubrey Beardsley drawings, a widow's-cruse-like bottle of Green Chartreuse, an Oscar Wilde book, some dubious blue china, some floppy ties, an assortment of second-hand epigrams, scent and scented tobacco, a nil admirari attitude ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... aloes, according to Oscar Wilde in the Picture of Dorian Grey, have the power of banishing melancholy wherever their perfume penetrates. Eolian Aloes may be the exotic melodies that drive care ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... guilty of so patent a misstatement must either never have read The Picture of Dorian Gray, or never have read The Renaissance. On the other hand, if on other more reliable evidence it can be found that Oscar Wilde was one of those "young men" misled by Pater's book, for whose spiritual safety Pater, as we have seen, was so solicitous, one can only remind oneself again of the phrase quoted above in regard to "that soil of human nature" into which a writer ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... professor greeted me with a humorous twist to what was visible of his bearded mouth. "Yes, it's still here," he said, gesturing at the device. "I've decided to build an entirely new one for Isaak, and besides, this one has afforded me considerable amusement. Furthermore, in the words of Oscar Wilde, who am I to tamper with a work of genius. After all, the mechanism is the product of the great ...
— The Ideal • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... success. 'Salome' (1906), on the other hand, has triumphed in Italy and Paris as well as in Germany, and succeeded in scandalising New York so seriously that it was withdrawn after a single performance. 'Salome' is a setting, almost unabbreviated, of Oscar Wilde's play of that name, which itself owed much to a tale by Flaubert. The scene is laid upon a terrace of Herod's palace, where soldiers are keeping watch while the king holds revel within. Salome, the daughter ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Oscar Wilde stuff, that is. How often have you felt the truth of what Mr. Grey says here, and yet have never been able to put it into words! It is this ability to put thoughts into words that makes him one of our most ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... fellow, in the P.M.G., has been beforehand with us in spotting "A Preface to Dorian Gray," by our OSCAR WILDE-r than ever, in this month's Fortnightly. Dorian Gray was published some considerable time ago, so it belongs to ancient history, and now, after this lapse of time, out comes the preface. And this "preface" occupies the better part, I use this ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... Irish names from the field of modern comedy in the English language written during the nineteenth century, and you have uncommonly little for which literary merit can be claimed. The quality of Oscar Wilde's is scarcely disputed. There is the more reason to dwell on Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays, because they have not even in the twentieth century been fully accepted by that queer folk, the theatre-going public. But I never yet heard of anyone who saw You Never can Tell, and was not ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... which I have contended, and am contending, in the management of Oscar Wilde's literary and dramatic property have brought me many valued friends; but only one friendship which seemed as endless; one friend's kindness which seemed to annul the disappointments of eight years. That is why I venture to place ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... here I come at last to my own particular function in the matter), Comedy, as a destructive, derisory, critical, negative art, kept the theatre open when sublime tragedy perished. From Moliere to Oscar Wilde we had a line of comedic playwrights who, if they had nothing fundamentally positive to say, were at least in revolt against falsehood and imposture, and were not only, as they claimed, 'chastening morals by ridicule,' but, in Johnson's ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw |
