Oscar Wilde Quotes

There is a moral dimension, for me, in anything that's any good.

Books are feeders of brothels.

Morals, not Art or Literature.

Without a clear moral vision, we devolve into moral relativism, and from there, into oblivion.

I think evil is very relative.

Modern morality is all about perception.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

My idea of what's good and bad and right and wrong is maybe greyer than most, and I like writing about that.

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

I wish to join the Legion of Decency, which condemns vile and unwholesome moving pictures. I unite with all who protest against them as a grave menace to youth, to home life, to country and to religion. I condemn absolutely those salacious motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land ... considering those evils, I hereby promised to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality.

There are the good and bad and every morrally ambiguous shade in between.

Most books are three-thirds rubbish.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability.

Good and bad, what's good and bad? I don't know.

Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.

I've learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always what they appear to be.

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

The difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

When I was a boy in the late 1950s, the public library refused to stock books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were regarded as vulgar, ill-written potboilers.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and when people start getting it confused, that means they need to sit down with some real people.

I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.