Oscar Wilde - Quotes 1-100
Oh, I don't think I would care to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.
Oscar Wilde
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.
Oscar Wilde
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 immensely.
Oscar Wilde
All bad poetry is sincere.
Oscar Wilde
Genius is born, not paid.
Oscar Wilde
We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man - that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
Oscar Wilde
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifetime romance.
Oscar Wilde
Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
Oscar Wilde
I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
Oscar Wilde
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
Oscar Wilde
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde
A good friend will always stab you in the front.
Oscar Wilde
I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde
I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.
Oscar Wilde
Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
Oscar Wilde
Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Oscar Wilde
You can never be overdressed or overeducated.
Oscar Wilde
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar Wilde
You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
Oscar Wilde
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
Oscar Wilde
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
Oscar Wilde
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Oscar Wilde
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Oscar Wilde
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Oscar Wilde
A man wants to be a woman's first love, a woman wants to be his last.
Oscar Wilde
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
Oscar Wilde
They've promised us that dreams come true, but forgot that nightmares are dreams, too.
Oscar Wilde
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.
Oscar Wilde
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
Oscar Wilde
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.
Oscar Wilde
Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.
Oscar Wilde
Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.
Oscar Wilde
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Oscar Wilde
It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
Oscar Wilde
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that's not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde
Who, being loved, is poor?
Oscar Wilde
The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid others might pick them up.
Oscar Wilde
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Oscar Wilde
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
Oscar Wilde
The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
Oscar Wilde
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.
Oscar Wilde
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
Oscar Wilde
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
Oscar Wilde
I can resist anything except temptation.
Oscar Wilde
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
I have nothing to declare except my genius. (when arriving in customs)
Oscar Wilde
Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.
Oscar Wilde
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
Oscar Wilde
Conscience is just a civilized word for cowardice.
Oscar Wilde
I never approve or disapprove of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.
Oscar Wilde
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Oscar Wilde
The heart was made to be broken.
Oscar Wilde
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humour was provided to console him for what he is.
Oscar Wilde
They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
Oscar Wilde
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
Oscar Wilde
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Oscar Wilde
Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Oscar Wilde
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
Oscar Wilde
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
Oscar Wilde
The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.
Oscar Wilde
Every woman is a rebel.
Oscar Wilde
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Oscar Wilde
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Oscar Wilde
The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
Oscar Wilde
No good deed goes unpunished.
Oscar Wilde
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.
Oscar Wilde
She lives the poetry she cannot write.
Oscar Wilde
Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.
Oscar Wilde
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
Oscar Wilde
Fashion is what one wears, what other people wear is unfashionable.
Oscar Wilde
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
Oscar Wilde
Behind every exquisite thing that excised, there was something tragic.
Oscar Wilde
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
Oscar Wilde
With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?
Oscar Wilde
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.
Oscar Wilde
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
Oscar Wilde
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
Oscar Wilde
There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely - or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.
Oscar Wilde
One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.
Oscar Wilde
If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.
Oscar Wilde
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
Oscar Wilde
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
Oscar Wilde
The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought or sold or bartered away. It can be poisoned or made more perfect. There is a soul in each one of us. I know it.
Oscar Wilde
How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.
Oscar Wilde
There is no sin except stupidity.
Oscar Wilde
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
Oscar Wilde
Youth is wasted on the young.
Oscar Wilde
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
Oscar Wilde
Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
Oscar Wilde
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
Oscar Wilde
Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.
Oscar Wilde
A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.
Oscar Wilde
There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence. I pity any poor woman whose husband is not called Ernest.
Oscar Wilde
It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.
Oscar Wilde
It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.
Oscar Wilde
