Oscar Wilde

'The Lady's World' should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

I have a dining room done in different shades of white, with white cushions embroidered in yellow silk: the effect is absolutely delightful and the room beautiful.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

Writing bores me so.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.

Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.

There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

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

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.