Oscar Wilde: Citations en anglais (Page 20)

“Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.”

“If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.”

“But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.”

“Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true.”

“I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.”

“Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.”

“America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.”

“Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable”

“She is a peacock in everything but beauty!”

“If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.”

“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”

“I don't want to earn my living, I want to live.”

“When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.”

“Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.”

“A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.”

“I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.”

“Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.

It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.”

“One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.”

“The moon in her chariot of pearl”