Oscar Wilde Quotes

If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself.

Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

It's no fun for an actor to keep repeating what you did before. It's always changing. I'm changing. The target keeps moving. That's the beauty of it.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

Art will never be able to exist without nature.

Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly, whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.

In differentiation, not uniformity, lies the path of progress.

Because we are four creative people - four writers - there was no way that we were ever going to be satiated doing the same thing over and again. Change was inevitable for us. And a very natural thing.

It's better to die doing good than to live doing evil.

It's Not sacrifice if it's someone else's life you're giving away, it's just evil.

True knowledge gives a moral standing and moral strength.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral.

In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure.

Is not virtue a negation of becoming?

I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys. No, quoting Nietzsche does that. Machiavelli is just cool.

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature

Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.

There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.

It is better to will the good than to know the truth.