Oscar Wilde: Cytaty po angielsku (strona 29)

“Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade.
Gwendolen. [Satirically. ] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.”

“Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little often share.”

“Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.”

“Oh, I don’t care about Jack. I don’t care for anybody in the whole world but you. I love you, Cecily. You will marry me, won’t you?
You silly boy! Of course. Why, we have been engaged for the last three months.
For the last three months?”

“I don't know how to talk.
Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.”

“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”

“Even things that are true can be proved.”

“When a golden girl can win
Prayer from out the lips of sin,
When the barren almond bears,
And a little child gives away its tears,
Then shall all the house be still
And peace come to Canterville.”

“My great mistake, the fault for which I can’t forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.”

“Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.”

“Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it.”

“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.”

“Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.”

“There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.”

“Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.”

“You are a sceptic." "Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith." "What are you?" "To define is to limit.”

“Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.”

“In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you”

“He hadn’t a single redeeming vice.”