Oscar Wilde quotes

Born
October 16, 1854 Dublin, Ireland.

Died
November 30, 1900.

Occupation
Author, poet, playwright.

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist and poet.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
– Oscar Wilde

Nowadays, people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
– Oscar Wilde

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
– Oscar Wilde

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
– Oscar Wilde

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.
– Oscar Wilde

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.
– Oscar Wilde

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.
– Oscar Wilde

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
– Oscar Wilde

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
– Oscar Wilde

There’s nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It’s a thing no married man knows anything about.
– Oscar Wilde

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
– Oscar Wilde

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
– Oscar Wilde

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
– Oscar Wilde

Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.
– Oscar Wilde

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
– Oscar Wilde

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

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
– Oscar Wilde

Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us.
– Oscar Wilde

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
– Oscar Wilde

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.
– Oscar Wilde

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
– 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

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
– Oscar Wilde

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
– Oscar Wilde

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
– Oscar Wilde

Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.
– Oscar Wilde

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
– Oscar Wilde

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
– Oscar Wilde

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
– Oscar Wilde

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
– Oscar Wilde

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
– Oscar Wilde

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
– Oscar Wilde

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
– Oscar Wilde

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.
– Oscar Wilde

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
– Oscar Wilde

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
– 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

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.
– Oscar Wilde

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
– Oscar Wilde

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
– Oscar Wilde

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.
– Oscar Wilde

If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
– Oscar Wilde

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.
– Oscar Wilde

Who, being loved, is poor?
– Oscar Wilde

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
– Oscar Wilde

True friends stab you in the front.
– Oscar Wilde

I can resist everything except temptation.
– Oscar Wilde

The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.
– Oscar Wilde

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
– Oscar Wilde

Women are made to be loved, not understood.
– Oscar Wilde

The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.
– Oscar Wilde

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
– 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

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.
– Oscar Wilde

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal
– 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

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.
– 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

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
– Oscar Wilde

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
– Oscar Wilde

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.
– Oscar Wilde

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.
– Oscar Wilde

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
– Oscar Wilde

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.
– Oscar Wilde

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
– Oscar Wilde

The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
– Oscar Wilde

One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.
– Oscar Wilde

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
– Oscar Wilde

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
– Oscar Wilde

Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
– Oscar Wilde

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 only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
– Oscar Wilde

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
– Oscar Wilde

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
– Oscar Wilde

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
– 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

Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‘Dorian Gray’ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.
– Oscar Wilde

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
– Oscar Wilde

Everything popular is wrong.
– Oscar Wilde

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.
– Oscar Wilde

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
– Oscar Wilde

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.
– Oscar Wilde

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
– Oscar Wilde

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
– Oscar Wilde

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But… it is better to be good than to be ugly.
– Oscar Wilde

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
– Oscar Wilde

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.
– Oscar Wilde

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.
– Oscar Wilde

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
– Oscar Wilde

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it… I can resist everything but temptation.
– Oscar Wilde

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.
– Oscar Wilde

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
– Oscar Wilde

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.
– Oscar Wilde

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
– Oscar Wilde

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.
– Oscar Wilde

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.
– Oscar Wilde

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.
– Oscar Wilde

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.
– Oscar Wilde

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
– Oscar Wilde

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
– Oscar Wilde

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
– Oscar Wilde

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
– Oscar Wilde

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
– Oscar Wilde