Oscar Wilde - Quotes 1-609
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
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
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
Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.
Oscar Wilde
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
Oscar Wilde
Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
Oscar Wilde
Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.
Oscar Wilde
If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-eduacated.
Oscar Wilde
I analyzed you, though you did not adore me.
Oscar Wilde
One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
Oscar Wilde
Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.
Oscar Wilde
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
Oscar Wilde
Irony is wasted on the stupid.
Oscar Wilde
If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.
Oscar Wilde
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Oscar Wilde
I beg your pardon I didn't recognise you - I've changed a lot.
Oscar Wilde
I don't think there is a woman in the world who would not be a little flattered if one made love to her. It is that which makes women so irresistibly adorable.
Oscar Wilde
I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.
Oscar Wilde
Truth is independent of facts always.
Oscar Wilde
The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.
Oscar Wilde
I have no objection to anyone's sex life as long as they don't practice it in the street and frighten the horses.
Oscar Wilde
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
Oscar Wilde
Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.
Oscar Wilde
Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true.
Oscar Wilde
I like talking to a brick wall - it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!
Oscar Wilde
My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
Oscar Wilde
I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.
Oscar Wilde
Women treat us (men) like humanity treats gods - they worship us and keep bothering us to do something.
Oscar Wilde
Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications....The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Oscar Wilde
Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.
Oscar Wilde
The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.
Oscar Wilde
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
Oscar Wilde
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
Oscar Wilde
Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.
Oscar Wilde
A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think that it is rather vain.
Oscar Wilde
Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
Oscar Wilde
Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
Oscar Wilde
Where there is no love there is no understanding.
Oscar Wilde
No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.
Oscar Wilde
When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.
Oscar Wilde
To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.
Oscar Wilde
Wisdom comes with winters.
Oscar Wilde
The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.
Oscar Wilde
Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.
Oscar Wilde
I am dying beyond my means.
Oscar Wilde
People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.
Oscar Wilde
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Oscar Wilde
Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
Oscar Wilde
I must say... that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.
Oscar Wilde
It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.
Oscar Wilde
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.
Oscar Wilde
The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.
Oscar Wilde
If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.
Oscar Wilde
We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.
Oscar Wilde
It's the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Oscar Wilde
The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.
Oscar Wilde
Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.
Oscar Wilde
Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.
Oscar Wilde
Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.
Oscar Wilde
Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.
Oscar Wilde
I drink to keep body and soul apart.
Oscar Wilde
The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.
Oscar Wilde
A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.
Oscar Wilde
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
Oscar Wilde
Thirty-five is a very attractive age; London society is full of women who have of their own free choice remained thirty-five for years.
Oscar Wilde
Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat.
Oscar Wilde
Skepticism is the beginning of faith.
Oscar Wilde
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
Oscar Wilde
The pen is mightier than the paving-stone.
Oscar Wilde
Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.
Oscar Wilde
Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.
Oscar Wilde
The secret to life is to enjoy the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.
Oscar Wilde
The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.
Oscar Wilde
It is so easy to convince others; it is so difficult to convince oneself.
Oscar Wilde
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about it's use. It is hitting below the intellect.
Oscar Wilde
Love is easily killed.
Oscar Wilde
I am the only person I would like to know thoroughly.
Oscar Wilde
She is a peacock in everything but beauty!
Oscar Wilde
One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable.
Oscar Wilde
Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.
Oscar Wilde
I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
Oscar Wilde
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
Oscar Wilde
The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.
Oscar Wilde
It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.
Oscar Wilde
Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.
Oscar Wilde
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
Oscar Wilde
To be really mediaeval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.
Oscar Wilde
Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life.
Oscar Wilde
Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it.
Oscar Wilde
When the prurient and the impotent attack you, be sure you are right.
Oscar Wilde
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
Oscar Wilde
I am happy in my prison of passion.
Oscar Wilde
I am getting rather astonishing in my Italian conversation. I believe I talk a mixture of Dante and the worst modern slang.
Oscar Wilde
The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.
Oscar Wilde
Each man kills the thing he loves.
Oscar Wilde
I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.
Oscar Wilde
The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.
Oscar Wilde
To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all!
Oscar Wilde
The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.
Oscar Wilde
I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.
Oscar Wilde
I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.
Oscar Wilde
No object is so beautiful that under certain conditions it won't look ugly.
Oscar Wilde
A man who takes himself too seriously will find that no one else takes him seriously.
Oscar Wilde
The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.
Oscar Wilde
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
Oscar Wilde
I approve of any activity that requires the wearing of special clothing.
(When asked what he thought of sports)
Oscar Wilde
Now produce your explanation and pray make it improbable.
Oscar Wilde
I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.
Oscar Wilde
One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.
Oscar Wilde
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
Oscar Wilde
When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together they talk about money.
Oscar Wilde
Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.
Oscar Wilde
No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime.
Oscar Wilde
Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
Oscar Wilde
The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.
Oscar Wilde
It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.
Oscar Wilde
The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.
Oscar Wilde
One should never make one's debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age.
Oscar Wilde
Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.
Oscar Wilde
I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
Oscar Wilde
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
Oscar Wilde
It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
Oscar Wilde
But what world says that (I'm wicked)? It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.
Oscar Wilde
One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Oscar Wilde
I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.
Oscar Wilde
If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.
Oscar Wilde
Conscience makes egotists of us all.
Oscar Wilde
I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
Oscar Wilde
Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.
Oscar Wilde
I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.
Oscar Wilde
To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies.
Oscar Wilde
In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
Oscar Wilde
The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
All great ideas are dangerous.
Oscar Wilde
People die of common sense.
Oscar Wilde
Life is the art of being well deceived, and to succeed, it must be habitual and uninterrupted.
Oscar Wilde
I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.
Oscar Wilde
The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.
Oscar Wilde
The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also.
Oscar Wilde
Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
Oscar Wilde
The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.
Oscar Wilde
It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.
Oscar Wilde
We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.
Oscar Wilde
Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.
Oscar Wilde
Millionaire models are rare enough; but, by Jove, model millionaires are rarer still!
Oscar Wilde
I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
Oscar Wilde
There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.
Oscar Wilde
There is a fatality about good resolutions - that they are always made too late.
Oscar Wilde
When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.
Oscar Wilde
I know. In fact, I am never wrong.
Oscar Wilde
I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself do not interest me. The have not got the charm of novelty.
Oscar Wilde
He hadn’t a single redeeming vice.
Oscar Wilde
I am always late on principle, my principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
Oscar Wilde
If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
Oscar Wilde
Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
Oscar Wilde
Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good.
Oscar Wilde
The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.
Oscar Wilde
My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.
Oscar Wilde
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
Oscar Wilde
If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation.
Oscar Wilde
The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.
Oscar Wilde
My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.
Oscar Wilde
They did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.
Oscar Wilde
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
Oscar Wilde
Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.
Oscar Wilde
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
Oscar Wilde
Experience is a question of instinct about life.
Oscar Wilde
Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.
Oscar Wilde
In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.
Oscar Wilde
Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life... I have put only my talent into my works.
Oscar Wilde
I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature Hell.
Oscar Wilde
I don't write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.
Oscar Wilde
High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
Oscar Wilde
I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.
Oscar Wilde
Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.
Oscar Wilde
I think after Christmas would be better for publication: I am hardly a Christmas present.
Oscar Wilde
Between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if as much as one.
Oscar Wilde
The unread is always better than the unreadable.
Oscar Wilde
Caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius.
Oscar Wilde
Even things that are true can be proved.
Oscar Wilde
The public is largely influenced by the look of a book. So are we all. It is the only artistic thing about the public.
Oscar Wilde
It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art.
Oscar Wilde
Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.
Oscar Wilde
The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.
Oscar Wilde
I'm too old to know everything.
Oscar Wilde
Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.
Oscar Wilde
Duty is what one expects from others.
Oscar Wilde
It would leave no room for developments and I intend to develop in many directions.
Oscar Wilde
The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.
Oscar Wilde
In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor.
Oscar Wilde
If people are dishonest once, they will be dishonest a second time. And honest people should keep away from them.
Oscar Wilde
Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.
Oscar Wilde
Do you smoke?
Well, yes, I must admit I smoke.
I'm glad to hear of it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.
Oscar Wilde
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
Oscar Wilde
I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.
Oscar Wilde
We always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others.
Oscar Wilde
It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.
Oscar Wilde
I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.
Oscar Wilde
If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.
Oscar Wilde
And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
Oscar Wilde
The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.
Oscar Wilde
It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name.
Oscar Wilde
Lean on principles, one day they'll end up giving way.
Oscar Wilde
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
What fire does not destroy, it hardens.
Oscar Wilde
If we're always guided by other people's thoughts, what's the point in having our own?
Oscar Wilde
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
Oscar Wilde
I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it.
Oscar Wilde
Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.
Oscar Wilde
But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.
Oscar Wilde
I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.
Oscar Wilde
Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failures.
Oscar Wilde
Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?
Oscar Wilde
