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Quotes by Oscar Wilde

Nothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
– Oscar Wilde
Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.
– Oscar Wilde
Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.
– Oscar Wilde
Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris.
– Oscar Wilde
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
– Oscar Wilde
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
– 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
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
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
– Oscar Wilde
Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
– Oscar Wilde
Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.
– Oscar Wilde
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
Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.
– 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
Some of these people need ten years of therapy -ten sentences of mine do not equal ten years of therapy.
– Oscar Wilde
Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.
– Oscar Wilde
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
– Oscar Wilde
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
– Oscar Wilde
The English country gentleman galloping after a fox - The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
– Oscar Wilde
The General was essentially a man of peace, except of course in his domestic affairs.
– Oscar Wilde
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
– Oscar Wilde
The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
– Oscar Wilde
The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.
– Oscar Wilde
The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.
– Oscar Wilde
The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.
– Oscar Wilde
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
– Oscar Wilde
The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
– 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
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.
– Oscar Wilde
The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
– Oscar Wilde
The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.
– Oscar Wilde
The security of Society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of Society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.
– Oscar Wilde
The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.
– Oscar Wilde
The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.
– Oscar Wilde
The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.
– 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
There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
– Oscar Wilde
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, theother is to read Pope.
– Oscar Wilde
There is no sin except stupidity.
– Oscar Wilde
There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
– 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 nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose.
– Oscar Wilde
There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
– Oscar Wilde
They afterwards took me to a dancing saloon where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice- 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'
– Oscar Wilde
This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
– Oscar Wilde
Those whom the gods love grow young.
– Oscar Wilde
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
– Oscar Wilde
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
– Oscar Wilde
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
– Oscar Wilde
To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
– 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
When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.
– Oscar Wilde
When good Americans die they go to Paris.
– Oscar Wilde
When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.
– Oscar Wilde
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
– Oscar Wilde
Who, being loved, is poor?
– Oscar Wilde
Women are made to be loved, not understood.
– Oscar Wilde
Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.
– Oscar Wilde
And beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.
– Oscar Wilde
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The koward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
– 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. 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. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it. As for marriage, of course that would be silly, but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women. I will certainly encourage them. They have the charm of being fashionable.
– Oscar Wilde
But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. 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
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
– Oscar Wilde
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
– Oscar Wilde
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
– Oscar Wilde
At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.
– Oscar Wilde
I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
– 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
Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
– 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
To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.
– Oscar Wilde
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
– Oscar Wilde
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
– Oscar Wilde
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
– Oscar Wilde
Vile deeds like poison weeds bloom well in prison air, it is only what is good in man, that wastes and withers there.
– Oscar Wilde
We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
– 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
Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
– Oscar Wilde
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
– Oscar Wilde
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
– Oscar Wilde
I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
– Oscar Wilde
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
– Oscar Wilde
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
– Oscar Wilde
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
– 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
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
– 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. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
– 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
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
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
– Oscar Wilde
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
– 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 suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means.
– Oscar Wilde
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
– 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
True friends stab you in the front.
– Oscar Wilde
There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
– Oscar Wilde
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
– Oscar Wilde
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
– Oscar Wilde
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
– Oscar Wilde