Category | Quote | E-Mail this quote |
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Acting | I love acting. It is so much more real than life. | |
Action | Action: the last resource of those who know not how to dream. | |
Advice | The only thing one can do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself. | |
Age | One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything | |
Agreement | Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. | |
Ambition | Ambition is the last refuge of the failure. | |
America | Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected. - ("The Picture of Dorian Gray") | |
Americans | The Americans are certainly great hero-worshipers, and always take their heros from the criminal classes. | |
Americans | We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language. | |
Americans | America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
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Arguments | Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing. | |
Art | The enemy of art is the absence of limitations. | |
Bachelors | Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier that others. | |
Bible | When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it. - (Irish-born author) | |
Biography | Biography lends to death a new terror. | |
Books | There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. | |
Bores | Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude. | |
Brotherhood | The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality. | |
Calmness | Nothing is so aggrivating as calmness. | |
Class | Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor. | |
Conceit | I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. | |
Conscience | Conscience and cowardice are really the same thing. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. | |
Consistency | Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. | |
Country | Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. | |
Cynics | What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. | |
Death | Alas, I am dying beyond my means. | |
Democracy | The bludgeioning of the people, by the people, for the people | |
Doubt | To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die. | |
Education | Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another. | |
Enimies | A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. | |
Experience | Experience is the name that everyone gives to their mistakes. | |
Fashion | Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. | |
Friends | A true friend stabs you in the front. | |
Genius | The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. | |
God | I sometimes think that God, in creating man, overestimated His ability. | |
Gossip | The only thing worse than peple talking about you is people not talking about you | |
Hunting | The English country gentleman galloping after a fox -- the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. | |
Illusion | Illusion is the first of all pleasures. | |
Information | It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information. | |
Insults | Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is intensely disliked by his freinds. | |
Insults | One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell by Dickens without laughing. | |
Insults | Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty. | |
Invitations | I must decline your invitation due to a subsequent engagement. | |
Journalism | The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. | |
Journalism | Journalism justifies its own existance by the great Darwinian principle of the the survival of the vulgarist. | |
Journalism | There is much to be said in favor of modern jounalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. | |
Kindness | One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. | |
Life | Life is too important to be taken seriously. | |
Life | Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about. | |
Marriage | Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same. | |
Martyrdom | A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. | |
Men and Women | Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals. | |
Misc. | Only the shallow know themselves. | |
Missionaries | Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants it or not. | |
Money | It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. | |
Morality | Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike. | |
Morning | Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. | |
Music | Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays. | |
Opinion | In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. | |
Optimism | The basis for optimism is sheer terror. | |
Patriotism | Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. | |
Peers | Why was I born with such contemporaries? | |
People | Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go. | |
People | Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. | |
People | It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. | |
Pessimists | Pessimist: one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both. | |
Philanthropy | Philanthropy is the refuge of rich people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures. | |
Poetry | There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope. | |
Poetry | All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. | |
Prejudice | I don't like principles. I prefer prejudices. | |
Reputation | One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation. | |
Saints | The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future. | |
Scandal | Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. | |
Seriousness | Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow. | |
Shakespeare | Are the commentators on "Hamlet" really mad, or only pretending to be. | |
Shakespeare | Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations. | |
Sincerity | A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. | |
Society | It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal. | |
Temperament | A bad temper, like Mr. Whistler's paintings, should never be displayed in public. | |
Time | Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event. | |
Truth | The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. | |
Wanger | I like Wagner's music better than any other music. Itis so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage. | |
War | As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar; it will cease to be popular. | |
women | women are a fascinatingly wilful sex. Every women is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself. | |
Youth | I am not young enough to know everything. |
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