Oscar Wilde - Quotes 201-300
Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women... merely adored.
Oscar Wilde
No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.
Oscar Wilde
Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
Oscar Wilde
It is very vulgar to talk about one's business.
Oscar Wilde
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
Oscar Wilde
In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
Oscar Wilde
The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart - hearts are made to be broken - but that it turns one's heart to stone.
Oscar Wilde
Hearts live by being wounded.
Oscar Wilde
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
Oscar Wilde
She can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it.
Oscar Wilde
Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.
Oscar Wilde
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Oscar Wilde
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
Oscar Wilde
After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.
Oscar Wilde
Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, Destiny never closed her accounts.
Oscar Wilde
Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the priviledge of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor shall be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
Oscar Wilde
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
Oscar Wilde
We women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes.
Oscar Wilde
Some things are more precious because they don't last long.
Oscar Wilde
What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
Oscar Wilde
My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.
Oscar Wilde
We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
Oscar Wilde
One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.
Oscar Wilde
Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.
Oscar Wilde
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Oscar Wilde
I can believe anything provided it is incredible.
Oscar Wilde
When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
Oscar Wilde
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
Oscar Wilde
A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.
Oscar Wilde
One should always be a little improbable.
Oscar Wilde
The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde
As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
Oscar Wilde
America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself.
Oscar Wilde
Each of us has heaven and hell in him...
Oscar Wilde
Most people are boring and stupid.
Oscar Wilde
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.
Oscar Wilde
At any rate she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair.
Oscar Wilde
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Oscar Wilde
It is a beautiful woman's fate to be the subject of conversation whereever she goes.
Oscar Wilde
It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
Oscar Wilde
The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
Oscar Wilde
I never change, except in my affections.
Oscar Wilde
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.
Oscar Wilde
I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.
Oscar Wilde
Arguments are to be avoided, they are always vulgar and often convincing.
Oscar Wilde
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings intentionally.
Oscar Wilde
The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
Oscar Wilde
Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was suing the Marquis of Queensbury in 1895 for libel accusing Wilde of homosexuality.
Counsel: Have you ever adored a young man madly?
Wilde: I have never given adoration to anyone except myself.
Oscar Wilde
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
Oscar Wilde
It is better to be beautiful then to be good, but it is better to be good then to be ugly.
Oscar Wilde
It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world.
Oscar Wilde
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde
A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.
Oscar Wilde
To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.
Oscar Wilde
People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.
Oscar Wilde
You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.
Oscar Wilde
I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.
Oscar Wilde
A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.
Oscar Wilde
Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.
Oscar Wilde
Looking around his hotel room not long before expiring: 'This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go.'
Oscar Wilde
Memory ... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Oscar Wilde
I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss.
Oscar Wilde
I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.
Oscar Wilde
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.
Oscar Wilde
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless.
Oscar Wilde
I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.
Oscar Wilde
When good Americans die, they go to Paris.
Oscar Wilde
I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.
Oscar Wilde
The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.
Oscar Wilde
Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving invitations.
Oscar Wilde
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.
Oscar Wilde
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
Oscar Wilde
I love to talk about nothing it's the only thing I know anything about.
Oscar Wilde
Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.
Oscar Wilde
A kiss may ruin a human life.
Oscar Wilde
Everyone is born a king; some people die in exile.
Oscar Wilde
I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.
Oscar Wilde
If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
Oscar Wilde
Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.
Oscar Wilde
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Oscar Wilde
Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
Oscar Wilde
I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.
Oscar Wilde
I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
Oscar Wilde
There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.
Oscar Wilde
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
Oscar Wilde
You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
Oscar Wilde
I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.
Oscar Wilde
When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything equal to it.
Oscar Wilde
If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.
Oscar Wilde
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself.
Oscar Wilde
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Oscar Wilde
The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.
Oscar Wilde
Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never happened or couldn't possibly have happened.
Oscar Wilde
My dear fellow, the truth isn't quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!
Oscar Wilde
They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.
Oscar Wilde
The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
Oscar Wilde
I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
Oscar Wilde
The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
Oscar Wilde
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.
Oscar Wilde
