Oscar Wilde - Quotes 501-600
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
Oscar Wilde
Civilization is not by means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.
Oscar Wilde
There were opium dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.
Oscar Wilde
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
Oscar Wilde
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
Oscar Wilde
The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
Oscar Wilde
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
Oscar Wilde
If the doors of perception were cleared everything will appear to us as it is, infinite.
Oscar Wilde
Biography lends to death a new terror.
Oscar Wilde
All good looks are a snare. They are a snare that every sensible man would like to be caught in.
Oscar Wilde
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
Oscar Wilde
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
Oscar Wilde
The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.
Oscar Wilde
There seemed to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.
Oscar Wilde
Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
Oscar Wilde
The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.
Oscar Wilde
It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.
Oscar Wilde
The man who says his wife can't take a joke, forgets she took him.
Oscar Wilde
I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
Oscar Wilde
Money doesn't make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million.
Oscar Wilde
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
Oscar Wilde
Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable.
Oscar Wilde
What is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity.
Oscar Wilde
Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.
Oscar Wilde
Life is short, art is infinite.
Oscar Wilde
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Oscar Wilde
Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.
Oscar Wilde
I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words.
Oscar Wilde
The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married.
Oscar Wilde
The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
Oscar Wilde
It would be more impressive if it flowed the other way.
(Commenting on Niagra Falls)
Oscar Wilde
To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.
Oscar Wilde
I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.
Oscar Wilde
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
Oscar Wilde
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.
Oscar Wilde
A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.
Oscar Wilde
He seems to read nothing but my books, and says his one desire is to 'follow in my footsteps!' But I have told him that they lead to terrible places.
Oscar Wilde
The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us.
Oscar Wilde
Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.
Oscar Wilde
The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it.
Oscar Wilde
Industry is the root of all ugliness.
Oscar Wilde
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
Oscar Wilde
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
Oscar Wilde
I have also learnt sympathy with suffering. To me, suffering seems now a sacramental thing, that makes those whom it touches holy.
Oscar Wilde
American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.
Oscar Wilde
Art only begins where imitation ends.
Oscar Wilde
You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
Oscar Wilde
Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.
Oscar Wilde
When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life, now that I'm old - I know it is!
Oscar Wilde
I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful.
Oscar Wilde
Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope.
Oscar Wilde
For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.
Oscar Wilde
Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.
Oscar Wilde
With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.
Oscar Wilde
It is better to repent a sin than regret the loss of a pleasure.
Oscar Wilde
God and other artists are always a little obscure.
Oscar Wilde
I quite agree with Dr. Nordau's assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.
Oscar Wilde
The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
Oscar Wilde
Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old.
Oscar Wilde
I forget what killed it. I think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. That is always a dreadful moment. It fills one with the terror of eternity.
Oscar Wilde
Ah, on what little things does happiness depend! I have read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for want of a red rose is my life made wretched.
Oscar Wilde
Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won't expect it back.
Oscar Wilde
When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.
Oscar Wilde
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.
Oscar Wilde
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.
Oscar Wilde
Art is not a thing. It is a way.
Oscar Wilde
Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.
Oscar Wilde
Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman.
Oscar Wilde
Those whom the gods love grow young.
Oscar Wilde
It is only the sacred things that are worth touching.
Oscar Wilde
The final mystery is oneself.
Oscar Wilde
It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.
Oscar Wilde
When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.
Oscar Wilde
I must remember that a good friend is a new world.
Oscar Wilde
The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.
Oscar Wilde
In America the president reigns for 4 years, and journalism governs for ever and ever.
Oscar Wilde
The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.
Oscar Wilde
There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is!
Oscar Wilde
Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.
Oscar Wilde
Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.
Oscar Wilde
You have never been poor, and never known what ambition is.
Oscar Wilde
I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.
Oscar Wilde
I suppose in about a fortnight we shall be told that he has been seen in San Francisco. It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.
Oscar Wilde
Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.
Oscar Wilde
I see that any materialism in life coarsens the soul, and that the hunger of the body and the appetites of the flesh desecrate always, and often destroy.
Oscar Wilde
It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
Oscar Wilde
Credit is a young man's capital.
Oscar Wilde
Sorrow... is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it.
Oscar Wilde
Friendship... is not something you learn in school, but if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship you really haven't learned anything.
Oscar Wilde
The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair.
Oscar Wilde
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Oscar Wilde
Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.
Oscar Wilde
My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.
Oscar Wilde
It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable.
Oscar Wilde
Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.
Oscar Wilde
The weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun.
Oscar Wilde
Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
Oscar Wilde
I am sorry my life is so marred and maimed by extravagance. But I cannot live otherwise. I, at any rate, pay the penalty of suffering.
Oscar Wilde
I was wrong. God's law is only Love.
Oscar Wilde
In America, the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefit of their inexperience.
Oscar Wilde
