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
– 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