"Oscar Wilde" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which the critic is trying to bring out: it is a sort of argument by force of stinging points. We may find an example of satire in its perfection in Swift, especially in his "Gulliver's Travels"—- since these are satires the point of which we can appreciate to-day. Oscar Wilde was peculiarly given to epigram, and in his plays especially we may find epigram carried to the same excess that the balanced structure is carried by Macaulay. More moderate epigram may be found in Emerson and Carlyle. ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... of Lying,' Mr. Tutt," said Tutt thoughtfully, as he dropped in for a moment's chat after lunch, "Oscar Wilde says, 'There is no essential incongruity between crime ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... man sat on a rickety chair. His back was turned to the room. He faced the two walls of his corner. The position struck me as odd until I noticed that he sat that way in order to get a little light on the pages of the book he read. It was Oscar Wilde's De Profundis. It was, I suppose, part of my business to make friends of the men round me. I managed with some difficulty to get into conversation with that man. He turned his chair half round and, starting from Oscar Wilde, gave ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... history of Modern Philosophy and Modern Science that one finds the strongest examples of this progress by paradox. The triumph of topsy-turveydom was when Galileo, the Oscar Wilde of Astronomy, declared that the earth went round the sun—a sheer piece of inversion. Darwin, the Barry Pain of Biology, asserted that man rose from the brutes, and that, instead of creatures being adapted to conditions, conditions ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... were so painfully practical. She sent the letter to Mrs. Stanton, who commented: "Well now, perhaps if we could paint injustice in delicate tints set in a framework of poetical argument, we might more easily entrap the Senator Edmunds and Oscar Wilde types of Adam's sons. Suppose at our next convention all of us dress in pale green, have a faint and subdued gaslight with pink shades, write our speeches in verse and chant them to a guitar accompaniment. Ah me! alas! how can we reform the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... barred from the mails; the innumerable volumes on "sex hygiene" by tawdry clergymen and smutty old maids are circulated by the million and without challenge. Frank Harris is deprived of a publisher for his "Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confession" by threats of immediate prosecution; the newspapers meanwhile dedicate thousands of columns to the filthy amusements of Harry Thaw. George Moore's "Memoirs of My Dead Life" are bowdlerized, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... of purpose. Feeling is an end in itself. This is unspeakable truth to a woman, and never true for one minute to a man. When man, in the Epicurean spirit, embraces feeling, he makes himself a martyr to it—like Maupassant or Oscar Wilde. Woman will never understand the depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will play at the other's game, but they will ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... but temptation," says a character in one of Oscar Wilde's plays. Too many of us have exactly this strength of will. We perhaps do not fall into gross crime, but because of our flabby resolution our lives become purposeless, negative, negligible. No one would miss us in particular if we were out ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... instinctively set Regnard far below him even as a writer. There can be no question that M. Rostand writes better verse than Emile Augier; but there can be no question, also, that Augier is the greater dramatist. Oscar Wilde probably wrote more clever and witty lines than any other author in the whole history of English comedy; but no one would think of setting him in the class with Congreve ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... that lifted its delicate head. Despite 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
... because de Quincey was an opium-fiend, Poe a drunkard and Oscar Wilde a pervert, it does not follow that every clever writer is unfit for decent society. Even if he were, his popularity would not suffer. Few things help a man's public reputation so much as his private vices. Don't you think you could cultivate hashish, Mario? Sherlock ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... his Salammbo. She dwells in the far-off Iles Blanches Esoteriques, and she, too, is annoyed by the stupidity of the sea, always new, always respectable! She is the first of the Salomes since Flaubert who has caught some of her prototype's fragrance. (Oscar Wilde's attempt proved mediocre. He introduced a discordant pathological note, but the music of Richard Strauss may save his pasticcio. It interprets the exotic prose of the Irishman with tongues of fire; it laps up the text, encircles it, underlines, amplifies, comments, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of 'The Golden Age,' Barry Pain, now a well known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older than the rest. But faces and names are vague to me and, while faces that I met but once may rise clearly before me, a face met on many a Sunday has perhaps vanished. ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... was a "fumiste"! If any one wishes to know what is thought of Mallarme by the younger French school, let him read the Mallarme chapter in Andre Gide's "Pretextes." In this very able book will be found also some wonderful reminiscences of Oscar Wilde. ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... should you?), march many mystical phantoms that are not of this base world. Pale HELEN steps out upon the battlements and turns to FLAUBERT her appealing glance, and CELLINI paces with Madame DE SEVIGNE through the eternal shadows of unrevealed realism. And BROWNING, and HOMER, and MEREDITH, and OSCAR WILDE are with them, the fleet-footed giants of perennial youth, like unto the white-limbed Hermes, whom Polyxena once saw, and straight she hied her away to the vine-clad banks of Ilyssus, where Mr. PATER stands contemplative, like some mad scarlet thing by DVORAK, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... was a little confusing to me, but I could guess at what he meant. Gorman appeared to him to be an unappreciated Oscar Wilde, one of those geniuses—I am bound to admit that they are mostly Irish—who delude the world into thinking they are uttering profound truths when they are ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham |
