Oscar Wilde - Quotes 101-200
Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken away from you.
Oscar Wilde
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
Oscar Wilde
I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.
Oscar Wilde
It was only in the theatre that I lived.
Oscar Wilde
Do you really think that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not - there is no weakness in that.
Oscar Wilde
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
Oscar Wilde
The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
Oscar Wilde
What are you? To define is to limit.
Oscar Wilde
Genius lasts longer than beauty.
Oscar Wilde
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
Oscar Wilde
Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death's house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is.
Oscar Wilde
Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What women like is to be a man’s last romance.
Oscar Wilde
Life is too short to learn German.
Oscar Wilde
The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously - and have somebody find out.
Oscar Wilde
The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself.
Oscar Wilde
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Oscar Wilde
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.
Oscar Wilde
Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.
Oscar Wilde
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
Oscar Wilde
Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.
Oscar Wilde
Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction.
Oscar Wilde
The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence.
Oscar Wilde
Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
Oscar Wilde
I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
Oscar Wilde
A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Oscar Wilde
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
Oscar Wilde
I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.
Oscar Wilde
Any man can be happy with any woman, so long as he doesn't love her.
Oscar Wilde
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
Oscar Wilde
But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.
Oscar Wilde
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
Oscar Wilde
When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.
Oscar Wilde
The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.
Oscar Wilde
She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
Oscar Wilde
The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world's sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer.
Oscar Wilde
Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative.
Oscar Wilde
What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.
Oscar Wilde
I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after.
Oscar Wilde
It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.
Oscar Wilde
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.
Oscar Wilde
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.
Oscar Wilde
Only the shallow know themselves.
Oscar Wilde
Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
I don't say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could.
Oscar Wilde
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
Oscar Wilde
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Oscar Wilde
Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties.
Oscar Wilde
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
It is wiser to remain silent and be thought ignorant than to speak and remove all doubt.
Oscar Wilde
You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing.
Oscar Wilde
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Oscar Wilde
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
Oscar Wilde
Lots of people act well, but very few people talk well, which shows that talking is much the more difficult thing of the two, and much the finer thing also.
Oscar Wilde
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.
Oscar Wilde
Practice precedes perfection.
Oscar Wilde
A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.
Oscar Wilde
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
Oscar Wilde
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Oscar Wilde
The play was a great success, but the audience was a total failure.
Oscar Wilde
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
Oscar Wilde
One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.
Oscar Wilde
She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.
Oscar Wilde
A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?
Oscar Wilde
I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.
Oscar Wilde
I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.
Oscar Wilde
Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
Oscar Wilde
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
Oscar Wilde
One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
Oscar Wilde
Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the soul alone are shameful.
Oscar Wilde
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
Oscar Wilde
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
Oscar Wilde
You should treat the trivial things in life seriously and the serious things in life with a sincere and studied triviality.
Oscar Wilde
Misfortunes one can endure - they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults - ah! - there is the sting of life.
Oscar Wilde
One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends.
Oscar Wilde
Everything popular is wrong.
Oscar Wilde
Women have no appreciation of good looks - at least, good women have not.
Oscar Wilde
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
Oscar Wilde
When Oscar Wilde was asked in an interview to list his 100 favorite books he said he could not. When asked why, he replied, 'Because I have only written five.'
Oscar Wilde
Be yourself; an original is always worth more than a copy!
Oscar Wilde
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
Oscar Wilde
I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.
Oscar Wilde
Punctuality is the thief of time.
Oscar Wilde
Some things are too important to be taken seriously.
Oscar Wilde
Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.
Oscar Wilde
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
Oscar Wilde
When the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
Oscar Wilde
Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive.
Oscar Wilde
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
Oscar Wilde
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde
She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
Oscar Wilde
How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?
Oscar Wilde
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
Oscar Wilde
I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
Oscar Wilde
Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.
Oscar Wilde
The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
Oscar Wilde
There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other - by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.
Oscar Wilde
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
Oscar Wilde
Looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not.
Oscar Wilde
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not to realise.
Oscar Wilde
I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like everyone else.
Oscar Wilde
