Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde Quotes

“If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“Besides, it is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“I am afraid that there is not much to be said in favour of either the lawyer or the journalist.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“It is style that makes us believe in a thing – nothing but style.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic century possible.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“Who indeed, in these degenerate days, would hesitate between an ode and an omelette, a sonnet and a salmi?”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“Then there is the true Academy model. He is usually a man of thirty, rarely good-looking, but a perfect miracle of muscles. In fact he is the apotheosis of anatomy, and is so conscious of his own splendour that he tells you of his tibia and his thorax, as if no one else had anything of the kind.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“The only real people are the people who never existed.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the vesture of the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid streets and hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“I quite admit that modern novels have many good points. All I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite unreadable.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“As a method Realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“But the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“To many today Oscar is a gay icon who can do no wrong, but, in truth, he was human, multifaceted and no saint. Part of the tragedy of Oscar Wilde is that it is now almost impossible to view him except through the prism of his downfall.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“And, right or wrong, rational or absurd, Oscar Wilde is always fascinating. He is the man you hope will walk into the room and come to sit at the spare place at your table.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde