Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Oscar Wilde, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Oscar Wilde quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 2512 Oscar Wilde quotes for you to read and share.
So lets knock a couple back and make some noise -- 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
The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. -- Oscar Wilde
I am covered with fine gold," said the Prince, "you must take it off, leaf by leaf, and give it to my poor. -- Oscar Wilde
Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole! -- Oscar Wilde
The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror. -- Oscar Wilde
One must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life. -- Oscar Wilde
and life, seeing her own image, was still, and dared not to speak. -- Oscar Wilde
Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well.
Algernon. I'm feeling very well, Aunt Augusta.
Lady Bracknell. That's not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together. -- Oscar Wilde
I am told, on excellent authority, that her father keeps an American dry-goods store," said Sir Thomas Burdon, -- Oscar Wilde
Is it thy will that I should wax and wane,
Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey,
And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain
Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day? -- 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
The one charm about the past is that it is the past. -- Oscar Wilde
He hasn't an enemy in the world, and none of his friend like him. -- Oscar Wilde
Possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any question
simple curiosity. I have a theory that it is always the women who propose -- Oscar Wilde
Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented. -- Oscar Wilde
It's most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when they are alone. The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life. -- Oscar Wilde
I am afraid it is quite clear, Cecily, that neither of us is engaged to be married to any one. -- Oscar Wilde
The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder. -- Oscar Wilde
I have promised to dine at White's, but it is only with an old friend, so I can send him a wire to say that I am ill, or that I am prevented from coming in consequence of a subsequent engagement. I think that would be a rather nice excuse: it would have all the surprise of candour. -- Oscar Wilde
He is fairer than the morning star, and whiter than the moon. For his body I would give my soul, and for his love I would surrender heaven. -- Oscar Wilde
Cultivated leisure is the aim of man. -- 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
There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband. -- Oscar Wilde
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray. -- Oscar Wilde
My friend is not allowed to go out today. I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life. They fill him with surprise. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine. -- Oscar Wilde
When I had to fill in my immigration papers, I gave my age as 19, and my profession as genius; I added that I had nothing to declare except my talent. -- Oscar Wilde
When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. -- Oscar Wilde
Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity? -- Oscar Wilde
Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas and the soul that was within him? Could it be that what that soul thought, they realized? -- that what it dreamed, they made true? -- Oscar Wilde
During the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of torture. His -- Oscar Wilde
Come, I tell you. You have chattered enough about corruption. Now you shall look on it face to face! -- Oscar Wilde
It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. -- Oscar Wilde
My philosophy? I'm always right and you are wrong. -- Oscar Wilde
Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb. -- Oscar Wilde
Create yourself. Be yourself your poem. -- Oscar Wilde
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized. -- Oscar Wilde
Behind the barricade there may be much that is noble and heroic. But what is there behind the leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle? And when these four are joined together they make a terrible force, and constitute the new authority. -- Oscar Wilde
The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. -- Oscar Wilde
You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far. -- Oscar Wilde
Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable. -- Oscar Wilde
If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life. -- Oscar Wilde
From your silken hair to your delicate feet you are perfection to me. Pleasure hides love from us, but pain reveals it in its essence. -- Oscar Wilde
You and I will always be friends."
"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. -- Oscar Wilde
you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. It does harm. -- Oscar Wilde
The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. -- Oscar Wilde
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship. -- Oscar Wilde
His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices. -- Oscar Wilde
Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss. -- Oscar Wilde
Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. -- Oscar Wilde
I analyzed you, though you did not adore me. -- Oscar Wilde
To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, -- Oscar Wilde
The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is. -- 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
Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither -- Oscar Wilde
If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female. -- Oscar Wilde
You can't possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It's absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that. -- Oscar Wilde
We shall be notes in that great Symphony
Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,
And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be
Once with our heart -- Oscar Wilde
I know he likes me. Of course I flatter him dreadfully. I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said. -- Oscar Wilde
Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable. -- Oscar Wilde
Dammit Sir, it's your duty to get married. You can't always be living for pleasure! -- Oscar Wilde
To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice. -- 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
I was wrong. God's law is only Love. -- Oscar Wilde
Skepticism is the beginning of faith. -- Oscar Wilde
The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. -- Oscar Wilde
A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain. -- Oscar Wilde
It is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. -- Oscar Wilde
That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! -- Oscar Wilde
The Americans are an extremely interesting people. They are absolutely reasonable. I think that is their distinguishing characteristic ... I assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans. -- Oscar Wilde
An actor is part illusionist, part artist, part ham. -- 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
I wish I had, for as sure as there is a God in heaven, if he ever does you any wrong, I shall kill him. -- Oscar Wilde
The harmony of soul and body - how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, and ideality that is void. -- Oscar Wilde
Biography lends to death a new terror. -- Oscar Wilde
Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon. -- Oscar Wilde
Lady Bracknell: He was eccentric, I admit. But only in later years. And that was the result of the Indian climate, and marriage, and indigestion, and other things of that kind. -- Oscar Wilde
Never met such a Gorgon ... I don't really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair. -- Oscar Wilde
LADY BRACKNELL
Algernon is an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, eligible young man. He has nothing, but he looks everything. What more can one desire? -- Oscar Wilde
LADY BRACKNELL
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
Do you smoke? Jack. Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. Lady Bracknell. I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is. -- Oscar Wilde
Lady Bracknell: Is this Miss Prism a female of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education?
Chasuble: (Somewhat indignantly) She is the most cultivated of ladies, and the very picture of respectability.
Lady Bracknell: It is obviously the same person. -- Oscar Wilde
Jack: Actually, I was found. Lady Bracknell: Found? Jack: Uh, yes, I was in ... a handbag. Lady Bracknell: A handbag? Jack: Yes, it was ... [makes gestures] Jack: an ordinary handbag. -- Oscar Wilde
Lady Bracknell, I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am? -- Oscar Wilde
LADY BRACKNELL
I had some crumpets with Lady Harbury, who seems to me to be living entirely for pleasure now.
ALGERNON
I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief. -- Oscar Wilde
LADY BRACKNELL. [Rising and drawing herself up.] You must be quite aware that what you propose is out of the question. JACK. Then a passionate celibacy is all that any of us can look forward to. -- Oscar Wilde
LADY BRACKNELL: It is my last reception, and one wants something that will encourage conversation, particularly at the end of the season when every one has practically said whatever they had to say, which, in most cases, was probably not much. -- Oscar Wilde
The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality. -- Oscar Wilde
You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty. -- Oscar Wilde
A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature. -- Oscar Wilde
That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men. -- Oscar Wilde
The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. -- Oscar Wilde
Wishing to make an effective entrance, he flung it wide open, when a heavy jug of water fell right down on him, wetting him to the skin, and just missing his left shoulder by a couple of inches. At the same moment he heard stifled shrieks of laughter proceeding from the four-post bed. -- Oscar Wilde
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. -- Oscar Wilde
It is very difficult sometimes to keep awake, especially at church, but there is no difficulty at all about sleeping. -- Oscar Wilde
Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. -- Oscar Wilde
I forgot that little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has someday to cry aloud on the housetops. -- Oscar Wilde
Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success. -- Oscar Wilde
Nowadays, saying what you really think can be a serious error since one risks being misunderstood. -- Oscar Wilde
I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. -- Oscar Wilde
He is fond of being misunderstood. It gives him a post of vantage. -- Oscar Wilde
I live constantly in the fear of not being misunderstood. -- Oscar Wilde
You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things...I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas -- Oscar Wilde
At least,
I have not made my heart a heart of stone,
Nor starved my boyhood of is goodly feast,
Nor walked where beauty is a thing unknown. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, when I think that I made of a man like you my ideal! the ideal of my life!
There was your mistake. There was your error. The error all women commit. Why can't you women love us, faults and all? -- Oscar Wilde
Hard work is amply the refuge of those who have nothing to do. -- Oscar Wilde
I would sooner lose my best friend than my worst enemy. To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him. -- Oscar Wilde
An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship. It starts in the right manner. -- Oscar Wilde
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy. -- Oscar Wilde
It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love -- Oscar Wilde
You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear. -- Oscar Wilde
It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it. -- 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
All imitation in morals and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation. -- Oscar Wilde
You have crushed the grapes against your palate. Nothing has been hidden from you. And it has all been to you no more than the sound of music. It has not marred you. -- Oscar Wilde
She had marred him for a moment, if he had wounded her for an age. -- Oscar Wilde
Waning. He was perfectly safe there. Nor, indeed, was it the death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind. It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. -- Oscar Wilde
was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his -- Oscar Wilde
Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion. -- Oscar Wilde
do they not tell us more of the real spirit of the Italian Renaissance, of the dream of Savonarola and of the sin of Borgia, than all the brawling boors and cooking women of Dutch art can teach us of the real spirit of the history of Holland? -- Oscar Wilde
A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. -- Oscar Wilde
Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds and dearer than fine opals. pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the market-place. It may not be purchased of the merchants, nor can it be weighted out in the balance for gold. -- 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
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. -- Oscar Wilde
The secret to life is to enjoy the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived. -- Oscar Wilde
If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any. -- Oscar Wilde
When the prurient and the impotent attack you, be sure you are right. -- Oscar Wilde
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. -- Oscar Wilde
Immanuel isn't a pun; he Kant be! -- Oscar Wilde
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much. -- Oscar Wilde
Dry-goods! What are American dry-goods?" asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. "American novels," answered Lord Henry, helping himself to some quail. -- Oscar Wilde
But Lady Brandon treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods. -- Oscar Wilde
Beauty ... is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon. -- Oscar Wilde
Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes. -- Oscar Wilde
It lies like a leper in purple, it sits like a dead thing smeared with gold. -- Oscar Wilde
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. -- Oscar Wilde
It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place -- Oscar Wilde
Really, if the lower orders don't set a good example, what on earth is the use of them? -- Oscar Wilde
Live the wonderful life that is in you. -- Oscar Wilde
I dare say that if I knew him I should not be his friend at all. It is a very dangerous thing to know one's friends. -- Oscar Wilde
Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worse habits. -- Oscar Wilde
You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. -- 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
When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, as any one who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins. -- Oscar Wilde
As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. -- Oscar Wilde
Besides, if Hans came here, he might ask me to let him have some flour on credit, and that I could not do. Flour is one thing, and friendship is another, and they should not be confused. Why, the words are spelled differently, and mean quite different things. Everyone can see that. -- Oscar Wilde
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up. -- Oscar Wilde
Our husbands would really forget our existence if we didn't nag at them from time to time, just to remind them that we have a perfect legal right to do so. -- Oscar Wilde
With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols of things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion. -- 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 coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with a sword -- Oscar Wilde
Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. -- Oscar Wilde
What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. -- Oscar Wilde
For nearly twenty minutes, neither of the men spoke. A fly buzzed noisily about the room, and the ticking of the clock was like the beat of a hammer. -- Oscar Wilde
Palermo was lovely. The most beautifully situated town in the world - it dreams away its life in the Conca d'Oro, the exquisite valley that lies between two seas. The lemon groves and the orange gardens were entirely perfect. -- Oscar Wilde
There are only two ways, as you know, of becoming civilized. One is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt. -- Oscar Wilde
He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life and weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering. -- Oscar Wilde
Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. -- Oscar Wilde
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. -- Oscar Wilde
Now and then it is a joy to have one's table red with wine and roses. -- Oscar Wilde
She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses," cried the young Student; "but in all my garden there is no red rose. -- Oscar Wilde
With beat of systole and of diastole One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart, And mighty waves of single Being roll From nerveless germ to man, for we are part Of every rock and bird and beast and hill, One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill. From -- Oscar Wilde
And does his philosophy make you happy?" "I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure." "And found it, Mr. Gray?" "Often. Too often." The duchess sighed. "I am searching for peace," she -- Oscar Wilde
past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. -- Oscar Wilde
The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain. -- Oscar Wilde
Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands. -- Oscar Wilde
Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris. -- Oscar Wilde
A beggar hates his benefactor as much as he hates himself for begging. -- Oscar Wilde
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities. -- Oscar Wilde
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. -- Oscar Wilde
Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority. -- Oscar Wilde
A misanthrope I can understand - a womanthrope, never! -- Oscar Wilde
Suddenly a dog bayed in the wood, and the dancers stopped, and going up two by two, knelt down, and kissed the man's hands. As they did so, a little smile touched his proud lips, as a bird's wing touches the water and makes it laugh. But there was disdain in it. -- Oscar Wilde
Death is the brother of Sleep, is he not? -- Oscar Wilde
Frank Harris has no feelings. It is the secret of his success. Just as the fact that he thinks that other people have none either is the secret of the failure that lies in wait for him somewhere on the way of Life. -- Oscar Wilde
I adore simple pleasures," said Lord Henry. "They are the last refuge of the complex. But I don't like scenes, except on the stage. -- Oscar Wilde
The domestic virtues are often very beautiful in others. -- Oscar Wilde
But the picture? What was he to say of that? It held the secret of his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look at it again? -- Oscar Wilde
This young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. -- Oscar Wilde
It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity, But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable. -- Oscar Wilde
The ages live in history through their anachronisms. -- Oscar Wilde
No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true. -- Oscar Wilde
We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes ... -- Oscar Wilde
An opinion is not necesarily correct just because you're willing to die for it. -- Oscar Wilde
We live in the age of the overworked and the undereducated. -- Oscar Wilde
Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets. -- Oscar Wilde
As he looked back upon man moving through History, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! ... Hedonism ... was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is but itself a moment. -- Oscar Wilde
Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed." "I don't think I am likely to marry, Harry. I am too much in love. That is one of your aphorisms. I am putting it into practice, as I do everything that you say. -- Oscar Wilde
Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art. -- Oscar Wilde
Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body. -- Oscar Wilde
Friendship never forgets. That is the wonderful thing about it. -- Oscar Wilde
A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks. -- Oscar Wilde
You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter - a girl brought up with the utmost care - to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel? -- Oscar Wilde
In art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. -- Oscar Wilde
One sometime feels that it is only with a front of brass and a lip of scorn that one can get through the day at all. -- Oscar Wilde
To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders ... It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. -- Oscar Wilde
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not. -- Oscar Wilde
I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, -- Oscar Wilde
Inside, in the servants' part of the house, the half-clad domestics were talking in low whispers to each other. Old Mrs. Leaf was crying and wringing -- Oscar Wilde
What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know. -- Oscar Wilde
Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost. -- 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
Industry is the root of all ugliness. -- Oscar Wilde
Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast. -- Oscar Wilde
Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalists. It will give us the peace that springs from understanding. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses. -- Oscar Wilde
If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life. -- Oscar Wilde
If you are not too long, I will wait for you all my life. -- Oscar Wilde
To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life. -- Oscar Wilde
The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. -- Oscar Wilde
A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent -- Oscar Wilde
It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. -- Oscar Wilde
He did not wring his hands, as do
Those witless men who dare
To try to rear the changeling Hope
In the cave of black Despair. -- Oscar Wilde
Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. -- Oscar Wilde
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. -- Oscar Wilde
They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences. -- Oscar Wilde
There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance. -- Oscar Wilde
Second time you have made that observation. If one puts forward an idea to a true Englishman
always a rash thing to do
he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. The only thing -- Oscar Wilde
It was you I thought of all the time, I gave to them the love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs. -- 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
Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art -- Oscar Wilde
Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear. -- Oscar Wilde
When a man does exactly what a woman expects him to do she doesn't think much of him. One should always do what a woman doesn't expect, just as one should say what she doesn't understand. -- Oscar Wilde
JACK: Yes, but said yourself that a severe chill was not hereditary.
ALGERNON: It usen't to be, I know - but I daresay it is now. Science is always making wonderful improvements in things. -- Oscar Wilde
Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid. -- Oscar Wilde
A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it. -- Oscar Wilde
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature. -- Oscar Wilde
Married men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands and abominably conceited when they are not. -- Oscar Wilde
Extravagance is the luxury of the poor; penury is the luxury of the rich. -- Oscar Wilde
We have quite the same ideas. No; I think our ideas are quite different. But he has been most pleasant. -- Oscar Wilde
As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest. -- Oscar Wilde
Life is too short to learn German -- Oscar Wilde
Thou art the same: 'tis I whose wretched soul Takes discontent to be its paramour, And gives its kingdom to the rude control Of what should be its servitor, - for sure Wisdom is somewhere, though the stormy sea Contain it not, and the huge deep answer 'Tis not in me.' To -- Oscar Wilde
While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance. -- Oscar Wilde
To know anything about oneself one must know all about others. -- Oscar Wilde
Dorian's whims are laws to everybody, except himself. -- Oscar Wilde
Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both. -- Oscar Wilde
Now produce your explanation and pray make it improbable. -- Oscar Wilde
The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. -- Oscar Wilde
Even things that are true can be proved. -- Oscar Wilde
We are talking about poor Dartmoor, Lord Henry, cried the duchess, nodding pleasantly -- 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 art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it. -- Oscar Wilde
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. -- Oscar Wilde
Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. -- 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. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. -- Oscar Wilde
The importance of being earnest, -- Oscar Wilde
If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even. Somebody--I -- Oscar Wilde
love is not safe -- Oscar Wilde
You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. -- Oscar Wilde
I beseech thee, for their days are as the days of flowers. And as for my soul, what doth my soul profit me, if it stand between me and the thing that I love? -- Oscar Wilde
Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last. -- Oscar Wilde
But I think it will bring you something besides this, something that is the knowledge of real strength in art: not that you should imitate the works of these men; but their artistic spirit, their artistic attitude, I think you should absorb that. -- Oscar Wilde
Down the long and silent street,
The dawn, with silver-sandaled feet,
Crept like a frightened girl. -- Oscar Wilde
At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. -- Oscar Wilde
I could deny myself the pleasure of talking, but not to others the pleasure of listening. -- Oscar Wilde
paused for a moment, and a wild feeling of pity came over him. After all, what right had he to pry into the life of Dorian Gray? If he had done a tithe of what was rumoured about him, how much he must have suffered! Then he straightened himself up, and walked over to the fire-place, and stood there, -- 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
Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious. -- 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
It is curious how vanity helps the successful man and wrecks the failure. -- Oscar Wilde
Surely Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds, and dearer than fine opals. Pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the marketplace. It may not be purchased of the merchants, for can it be weighed out in the balance for gold. -- 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
The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value. -- Oscar Wilde
She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. -- Oscar Wilde
She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. -- Oscar Wilde
Millionaire models are rare enough; but, by Jove, model millionaires are rarer still! -- Oscar Wilde
There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor. -- Oscar Wilde
Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility. -- Oscar Wilde
The secret seems to be the only way to become mysterious and wonderful modern life. The commonest thing gets a touch fascinating when done on the sly. -- Oscar Wilde
And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive. -- Oscar Wilde
Be happy, be happy; you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's-blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty. -- Oscar Wilde
Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualification. -- Oscar Wilde
It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest. -- Oscar Wilde
The sin was mine; I did not understand. So now is music prisoned in her cave, Save where some ebbing desultory wave Frets with its restless whirls this meagre strand ... -- Oscar Wilde
The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future. -- Oscar Wilde
There is no feeling more comforting and consoling than knowing you are right next to the one you love. -- Oscar Wilde
The visible aspect of modern life disturbs him not; rather is it for him to render eternal all that is beautiful in Greek, Italian, and Celtic legend. -- Oscar Wilde
The Americans are identical to the British in all respects except, of course, language. -- Oscar Wilde
It was conscious of the events of life as they occurred. -- Oscar Wilde
The ugly can be beautiful. The pretty, never. -- Oscar Wilde
Come, dear, [Gwendolen rises] we have already missed five, if not six, trains. To miss any more might expose us to comment on the platform. -- Oscar Wilde
Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all. -- Oscar Wilde
She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm. -- Oscar Wilde
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it -- Oscar Wilde
I hope to-morrow will be a fine day, Lane.
It never is, sir.
Lane, you're a perfect pessimist.
I do my best to give satisfaction, sir. -- Oscar Wilde
Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won't expect it back. -- Oscar Wilde
Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man. -- Oscar Wilde
And to the little Squirrel who lived in the fir-tree, and was lonely, he said, 'Where is my mother?' And the Squirrel answered, 'Thou hast slain mine. Dost thou seek to slay thine also? -- Oscar Wilde
I would sooner say, or hear it said of me, that I was so typical a child of my age, that in my perversity, and for that perversity's sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good. -- Oscar Wilde
I shall show you my soul. You shall see the thing that you fancy only God can see. -- Oscar Wilde
True friends stab you in the front -- Oscar Wilde
No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will. -- Oscar Wilde
You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. living, as you all do, on other and by them, you need at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there. -- Oscar Wilde
Art persists, it timelessly continues. -- Oscar Wilde
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be. -- Oscar Wilde
From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it. -- Oscar Wilde
As a wicked man I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back. -- Oscar Wilde
A grapefruit is just a lemon that saw an opportunity and took advantage of it. -- Oscar Wilde
The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual. -- Oscar Wilde
When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage." and the portrait "in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty." p 349 -- Oscar Wilde
What is said of man is nothing; the point is, who says it. -- Oscar Wilde
America is one long expectoration. -- Oscar Wilde
Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea. -- 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
But this murder
was it to dog him all his life? Was he always to be burdened by his past? Was he really -- Oscar Wilde
Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable. -- Oscar Wilde
Everyone quoted it, it was full of so many words that they could not understand. -- Oscar Wilde
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. -- Oscar Wilde
Prism! Where is that baby? -- 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
We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality. -- Oscar Wilde
MRS. ALLONBY. Curious thing, plain women are always jealous of their husbands, beautiful women never are!
LORD ILLINGWORTH. Beautiful women never have time. They are always so occupied in being jealous of other people's husbands. -- Oscar Wilde
And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. -- Oscar Wilde
All love is true, but not all truth ... is love? -- Oscar Wilde
It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then only at dinner parties. -- Oscar Wilde
Nature is always behind the age -- Oscar Wilde
What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date. -- Oscar Wilde
LORD GORING: ... All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may. -- Oscar Wilde
I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules. -- Oscar Wilde
Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask. -- Oscar Wilde
The hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead. It was intolerable. It seemed to crush him. -- Oscar Wilde
You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. -- Oscar Wilde
Pleasures may turn a heart to stone, riches may make it callous, but sorrows cannot break it. Hearts live by being wounded. -- Oscar Wilde
Hearts Live By Being Wounded -- Oscar Wilde
We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art. -- Oscar Wilde
So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets ... -- Oscar Wilde
I was on the point of explaining to Gerald that the world has always laughed at its own tragedies, that being the only way in which it has been able to bear them. And that, consequently, whatever the world has treated seriously belongs to the comedy side of things. -- Oscar Wilde
I am very pleased you like my stories. They are studies in prose, put for Romance's sake into fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find simplicity in a subtle strangeness. -- Oscar Wilde
When I was young, I was no one. Now, I'm worldwilde. -- Oscar Wilde
The best revenge is to live well. -- Oscar Wilde
All I want now is to look at life. -- Oscar Wilde
Education is an admirable thing. -- Oscar Wilde
Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. -- Oscar Wilde
Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. -- Oscar Wilde
I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated. I -- Oscar Wilde
He read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot, lotus-covered Nile. -- Oscar Wilde
He must have a truly romantic nature, for he weeps when there is nothing at all to weep about. -- Oscar Wilde
What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait) -- Oscar Wilde
Inteligence lives longer than beauty. -- Oscar Wilde
Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old. -- Oscar Wilde
Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity. -- Oscar Wilde
The final mystery is oneself. -- Oscar Wilde
What a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed Lord Henry. "Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. 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
Cecily is the sweetest, dearest, prettiest girl in the whole world. And I don't care twopence about social possibilities. -- Oscar Wilde
I have a dining room done in different shades of white, with white cushions embroidered in yellow silk: the effect is absolutely delightful and the room beautiful. -- Oscar Wilde
He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed by being always absolutely over-educated. He is a very modern type. -- Oscar Wilde
Lawyers have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent. -- Oscar Wilde
Indeed, so far from being humorous, the male American is the most abnormally serious creature who ever existed.. It is only fair to admit that he can exaggerate, but even his exaggeration has a rational basis. It is not founded on wit or fancy; it does not spring from any poetic imagination. -- Oscar Wilde
The vulgar directness of the question called for a direct answer. -- Oscar Wilde
If God really wanted to punish, he'd answer all our prayers. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't call women of that kind clever. I call them stupid!
Same thing often. -- Oscar Wilde
MRS ALLONBY I adore them. The clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk.
HESTER I think the stupid people talk a great deal.
MRS ALLONBY Ah, I never listen! -- Oscar Wilde
To be in love is to surpass one's self. -- Oscar Wilde
In one dancing saloon 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
As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg -- Oscar Wilde
He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should always be here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in the summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. -- Oscar Wilde
I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one's life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon's head, and one suffers, because it does not turn one to stone. -- Oscar Wilde
Tread Lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow. -- Oscar Wilde
What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one's death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That's all that can be said about land. -- Oscar Wilde
A method of procuring sensations? Do you think then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again? Don't tell me that." says Dorian.
"Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," says Lord Henry -- Oscar Wilde
Don't feed the trolls; nothing fuels them so much. -- Oscar Wilde
I did not want any external influence in my life. You know how independent I am by nature. I have always been my own master; had at least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray. -- Oscar Wilde
The best people to work for are me, myself and I. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else. -- Oscar Wilde
The world seemed to me fine because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived. -- Oscar Wilde
The man who says his wife can't take a joke, forgets that she took him. -- 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
Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another. -- Oscar Wilde
Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel -- Oscar Wilde
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. -- Oscar Wilde
He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. -- Oscar Wilde
The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend upon it for their daily bread, and the highest form of literature, poetry, brings no wealth to the singer. For producing your best work also you will require some leisure and freedom from sordid care. -- Oscar Wilde
In fact, he was dressed for the character of 'Jonas the Graveless, or the Corpse-Snatcher of Chertsey Barn,' one of his most remarkable impersonations -- Oscar Wilde
No one wants to see a play called 'Lady Windermere's Fan'. It's going to be called 'Cocks in Frocks II' or I will find another publisher -- Oscar Wilde
Religion?" "The fashionable substitute for belief. -- Oscar Wilde
Her ivory hands on the ivory keys
Strayed in a fitful fantasy,
Like the silver gleam when the poplar trees
Rustle their pale leaves listlessly,
Or the drifting foam of a restless sea
When the waves show their teeth in the flying breeze. -- Oscar Wilde
Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to. -- Oscar Wilde
Yes, very sensible ... People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame. -- 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
Whenever cannibals are on the brink of starvation, Heaven, in its infinite mercy, sends them a fat missionary. -- Oscar Wilde
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. -- Oscar Wilde
Just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising and lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweler. -- Oscar Wilde
The only thing I have to declare is my genius. -- Oscar Wilde
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. -- Oscar Wilde
Psychology is in its infancy, as a science. I hope, in the interests of Art, it will always remain so. -- Oscar Wilde
I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope. -- Oscar Wilde
A man who pays his bills on time is soon forgotten. -- Oscar Wilde
The drawback of stealing a thing, is that one never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is. -- Oscar Wilde
Some subtle influence passed from him to me, and for the first time in my life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I had always looked for, and always missed. -- Oscar Wilde
The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure. -- Oscar Wilde
I can believe anything provided it is incredible. -- Oscar Wilde
I can resist everything except temptation. -- Oscar Wilde
The only thing I can't resist is temptation. -- Oscar Wilde
I can resist anything but temptation. -- Oscar Wilde
I can resist anything but the temptation to make a clever witticism. -- Oscar Wilde
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it ... I can resist everything but temptation. -- Oscar Wilde
One cannot always keep an adder in one's breast to feed one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one's soul. -- Oscar Wilde
He was afraid of certainty. -- Oscar Wilde
Ah! it is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself. To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one's own. To know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods. -- Oscar Wilde
Women's styles may change but their designs remain the same. -- Oscar Wilde
The problem with the common person is that he is so unbearably common! -- Oscar Wilde
Were there no law there'd be no law-breakers, So all men would be virtuous. -- 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
One should always be a little improbable. -- Oscar Wilde
Lord AUGUSTUS:(looking around) Time to educate yourself, I suppose.
DUMBY: No, time to forget all I have learned. That is much more important. -- Oscar Wilde
Even if I had not been waiting but had shut the doors against you, you should have remembered that no one can possibly shut the doors against love forever. -- Oscar Wilde
Only England could have produced him, and he always said that the country was going to the dogs. -- Oscar Wilde
My father told me to go to bed an hour ago. I don't see why I shouldn't give you the same advice. I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of ant use to oneself. -- Oscar Wilde
He loves first editions, especially of women: little girls are his passion. -- Oscar Wilde
table. He could not help seeing the dead thing. How still it was! How horribly white the long hands looked! It was like a dreadful wax image. -- Oscar Wilde
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly. -- 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
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing. -- Oscar Wilde
Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. -- Oscar Wilde
Could we dig up this long-buried treasure, Were it worth the pleasure, We never could learn love's song, We are parted too long. Could the passionate past that is fled Call back its dead, Could we live it all over again, Were it worth the pain! -- Oscar Wilde
If music be the food of love, get me a supersized big mac, chips, two apple pies and a large milkshake. -- Oscar Wilde
It is sweet to dance to violins
When love and life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air! -- 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
Just to let you know that the buffet car will be closing for stocktaking in five minutes. The next station stop is Chesterfield. -- Oscar Wilde
People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. -- Oscar Wilde
The Governor was strong upon
The Regulation Act:
The Doctor said that Death was but
A scientific fact:
And twice a day the Chaplain called,
And left a little tract. -- Oscar Wilde
Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties. -- Oscar Wilde
Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you'll never be invited to a party. -- Oscar Wilde
Dear little Swallow,' said the Prince, 'you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery. -- Oscar Wilde
I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart. -- Oscar Wilde
A mask tells us more than a face. -- Oscar Wilde
One should never take sides in anything, Mr. Kelvil. Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, I don't care about Jack. I don't care for anybody in the whole world but you. I love you, Cecily. You will marry me, won't you?
You silly boy! Of course. Why, we have been engaged for the last three months.
For the last three months? -- Oscar Wilde
She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret. -- Oscar Wilde
Complex people waste half their strength in trying to conceal what they do. Is it any wonder they should always come to grief? -- Oscar Wilde
Ah! that quite does for me. I haven't a word to say ... Too much care was taken with our education, I am afraid. To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one out from so much. -- Oscar Wilde
I love the French language ... it's a delightful language, especially to curse with. It's like whopping your ass with silk. -- Oscar Wilde
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious -- Oscar Wilde
I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones. -- Oscar Wilde
Love is like a war; easy to start but hard to end and you never know where it might take you. -- Oscar Wilde
If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty -- Oscar Wilde
They met a policeman and brought him back. The man rang the bell several times, but there was no answer. Except for a light in one of the top windows, the house was all dark. After -- Oscar Wilde
Life is short, art is infinite. -- Oscar Wilde
The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us. I know it. -- Oscar Wilde
Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds. -- Oscar Wilde
How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver. -- Oscar Wilde
Well, she wore far too much rouge last night, and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of desperation in a woman. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't wish to harm the ghost in any way,' he said. He looked at his young sons. 'And it is not polite to throw pillows at someone who has been in this house for so long. -- Oscar Wilde
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital. -- Oscar Wilde
Those who go beneath the surface, do so at their peril. -- Oscar Wilde
There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies. -- Oscar Wilde
The costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life. -- Oscar Wilde
A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position. -- Oscar Wilde
Marriage is hardly a thing one can do now and then, except in America. -- Oscar Wilde
I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen months at any
rate, so that if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful
books; and what joy can be greater? -- Oscar Wilde
And now, I am dying beyond my means. (Said while sipping champagne on his deathbed.) -- Oscar Wilde
Give me the luxuries and I can dispense with the necessities. -- Oscar Wilde
Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly. -- Oscar Wilde
Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?
I didn't think it polite to listen, sir. -- Oscar Wilde
What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? -- Oscar Wilde
the thing whose grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had not stirred, but -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope. -- Oscar Wilde
But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything. -- Oscar Wilde
The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison. -- Oscar Wilde
Could we live it over again, Were it worth the pain, Could the passionate past that is fled Call back its dead! -- Oscar Wilde
One must have some sort of occupation nowadays. If I hadn't my debts I shouldn't have anything to think about. -- Oscar Wilde
The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality. -- Oscar Wilde
I have nothing to declare but my genius, and this four-kilo bag of cocaine. -- Oscar Wilde
Dear Christ! the very prison walls Suddenly seemed to reel, And the sky above my head became Like a casque of scorching steel; And, though I was a soul in pain, My pain I could not feel. -- Oscar Wilde
How clever are you, my dear! You never mean a single word you say! -- Oscar Wilde
Caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius. -- Oscar Wilde
Men of thoughts should have nothing to do with action. -- Oscar Wilde
American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past. -- Oscar Wilde
You are remarkably modern, Mabel. A little too modern, perhaps. Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly. -- Oscar Wilde
A virtuous abstinence from the joys of pederasty comes most easily to those who have no taste for it. -- Oscar Wilde
Some love too little, some too long, Some sell, and others buy; Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die. He -- Oscar Wilde
Choice is taken from them and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm. (138) -- Oscar Wilde
With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone. -- Oscar Wilde
London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognize them. They look so thoroughly unhappy. -- Oscar Wilde
Lord Henry looked serious for some moments, 'It is perfectly monstrous,' he said at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutley and entirely true. -- Oscar Wilde
Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude. -- Oscar Wilde
There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer. -- Oscar Wilde
I have come up to town expressly to propose to her.
Algernon. I thought you had come up for pleasure? ... I call that business. -- Oscar Wilde
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure -- 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
I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who be in jail
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long. -- Oscar Wilde
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. -- Oscar Wilde
To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life. I -- Oscar Wilde
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life. -- Oscar Wilde
Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. -- Oscar Wilde
Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. -- Oscar Wilde
I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions - that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were. -- Oscar Wilde
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. -- Oscar Wilde
As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious...How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy. -- Oscar Wilde
When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to -- Oscar Wilde
From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power. -- Oscar Wilde
I can sympathise with everything, except suffering", cried Lord Harry, Shrugging his shoulders. "I cannot sympathise with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. -- Oscar Wilde
LORD ILLINGWORTH. As George Harford I had everything I wanted. Now I have merely everything that other people want, which isn't nearly so pleasant. -- Oscar Wilde
The greatest of all sins is stupidity. -- Oscar Wilde
Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They're the only things we can pay. -- Oscar Wilde
His nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame. Out of its secret hiding-place had crept his Soul, and Desire had come to meet it on the way. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't think I am heartless. Do you?'
'You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian,' answered Lord Henry with his sweet melancholy smile. -- Oscar Wilde
It is what we fear that happens to us. -- Oscar Wilde
I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister.
Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first. -- Oscar Wilde
The beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance ... living on the memory of crushing defeats -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, I love London Society! I think it has immensely improved. It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be. lord caversham. Hum! Which is Goring? Beautiful idiot, or the other thing? mabel chiltern. -- Oscar Wilde
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art. -- 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
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it. -- Oscar Wilde
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends. -- Oscar Wilde
An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him. -- Oscar Wilde
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. -- Oscar Wilde
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market place of any single thing. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, do not cease at all; I thought the nightingale sang but at night; or if thou needst must cease, then let my lips touch the sweet lips that can such music make. -- 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
Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism. -- Oscar Wilde
Everything in moderation, including moderation. -- Oscar Wilde
The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all. -- 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
However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive. -- Oscar Wilde
All criticism is a form of autobiography -- Oscar Wilde
Niagara Falls is simply a vast unnecessary amount of water going over the wrong way and then falling over unnecessary cliffs ... The wonder would be if the water did not fall. -- Oscar Wilde
Sin should be solitary and have no accomplices. -- Oscar Wilde
The dead linger sometimes. -- Oscar Wilde
I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. -- Oscar Wilde
She knew nothing but she had everything he had lost. -- Oscar Wilde
One of the requisites of sanity is to disagree with the majority of the British public. -- Oscar Wilde
We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, that fire can purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. -- Oscar Wilde
The only thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them. -- Oscar Wilde
Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. -- Oscar Wilde
Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. -- Oscar Wilde
One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. -- Oscar Wilde
All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon. -- Oscar Wilde
There was purification in punishment. Not 'Forgive us our sins,' but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of a man to a most just God. -- Oscar Wilde
Not "Forgive us for our sins" but "Smite us for our iniquities" should be the prayer of man to a most just God. -- Oscar Wilde
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. -- Oscar Wilde
We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with those virtues that are likely to benefit ourselves. 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
The only one you need in your life is that person who shows you he needs you in his. -- Oscar Wilde
All those who come in contact with his [Christ's] personality, even though they may neither bow to his altar or kneel before his priest, in some way find that the ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their sorrow is revealed to them. -- Oscar Wilde
It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone. -- Oscar Wilde
Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; -- Oscar Wilde
experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions; and certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to promise rich and fruitful results. His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon -- Oscar Wilde
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. -- Oscar Wilde
People who shout so loud, my lords, do nothing; the only men I fear are silent men -- Oscar Wilde
Some one has killed herself for love of you. I wish that I had ever had such an experience. -- Oscar Wilde
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. -- Oscar Wilde
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. -- Oscar Wilde
I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest. -- Oscar Wilde
Each of us has heaven and hell in him... -- Oscar Wilde
After a good quality dinner one will be able to forgive anybody, still one's own relations. -- Oscar Wilde
I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living. -- Oscar Wilde
Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills. -- 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
One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation. -- Oscar Wilde
I like the duchess very much, but I don't love her."
"And the duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less, so you are excellently matched. -- Oscar Wilde
They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. -- Oscar Wilde
History is merely gossip -- Oscar Wilde
The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature -- 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
And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children's heads. -- Oscar Wilde
Like silver moons the pale narcissi lay -- Oscar Wilde
What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us. -- Oscar Wilde
I never saw sad men who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
We prisoners called the sky,
And at every happy cloud that passed
In such strange freedom by. -- Oscar Wilde
Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes. -- Oscar Wilde
How long could you love a woman who didn't love you, Cecil?
A woman who didn't love me? Oh, all my life! -- Oscar Wilde
Children start out loving their parents, but as they grow older and discover their parents are human, they become judgmental. And sometimes, when they mature, they forgive their parents, especially when they discover they are also human. -- Oscar Wilde
We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken. -- Oscar Wilde
I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious."
"Oh, that's nonsense, Algy. You never talk anything but nonsense."
"Nobody ever does. -- Oscar Wilde
The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her. -- Oscar Wilde
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 intensely. -- Oscar Wilde
It was useless. The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks. Then, -- Oscar Wilde
For that there was no atonement; but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was possible still, -- 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
Vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people. -- 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
Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf. -- Oscar Wilde
Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ. -- Oscar Wilde
Whatever music sounds like, I am glad to say it does not sound in the smallest degree like German. -- Oscar Wilde
It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees. -- Oscar Wilde
Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change. -- Oscar Wilde
Untruthful! My nephew Algernon? Impossible! He is an Oxonian. -- Oscar Wilde
Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it comes into existence. -- Oscar Wilde
An egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different. -- Oscar Wilde
I would merely beg you not to be too much bowed down by grief. What seem to us bitter trails are often blessings in disguise. -- Oscar Wilde
A live unexamined isn't worth living. I will add, A life unlived isn't worth examining. -- Oscar Wilde
He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination. -- Oscar Wilde
Then there was a man who said, 'I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; by then it was too late' -- Oscar Wilde
When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound. -- 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
Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed. -- Oscar Wilde
I have forgotten all about my school days. I have a vague impression that they were detestable. -- Oscar Wilde
Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping. -- Oscar Wilde
I'll see if I can't make the bitter waters sweet by the intensity of love I bear you -- Oscar Wilde
Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals. -- 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." "Dorian, this is -- Oscar Wilde
I don't like Switzerland; it has produced nothing but theologians and waiters. -- Oscar Wilde
I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't recognize you - I've changed a lot. -- Oscar Wilde
There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful. -- Oscar Wilde
Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not quite old enough to do that. -- Oscar Wilde
Everything that is popular is wrong. -- 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
When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs." "Narborough wasn't perfect," cried the old lady. -- Oscar Wilde
God and other artists are always a little obscure ... -- Oscar Wilde
The only way to get rid of tempation is to yeild to it. -- Oscar Wilde
I do not approve of anything which tampers with natural ignorance -- 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
In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn? -- Oscar Wilde
For one moment our lives met, our souls touched. -- Oscar Wilde
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!"
Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898 -- Oscar Wilde
I don't desire to change anything in England except the weather, I am quite content with philosophical contemplation. -- Oscar Wilde
Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul. -- Oscar Wilde
The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? -- Oscar Wilde
The aim of life is self-development -- Oscar Wilde
The family as subversive of true socialistic and communal unity is to be annihilated." Yes, President, I agree completely with Article 5. A family is a terrible incumbrance, especially when one is not married. -- Oscar Wilde
I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about. -- Oscar Wilde
The best way to appreciate your job is to, is here to stay. -- Oscar Wilde
Cats are put on earth to remind us that not everything has a purpose. -- Oscar Wilde
And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal -- Oscar Wilde
For only blood can wipe out blood, And only tears can heal: And the crimson stain that was of Cain Became Christ's snow-white seal. VI. -- Oscar Wilde
Open it at that sad madrigal that begins "Que m'importe que tu sois sage? Sois belle! et sois triste" and you will find yourself worshiping sorrow as you never worshiped joy. -- Oscar Wilde
I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in my life. -- Oscar Wilde
The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art. -- Oscar Wilde
To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. -- Oscar Wilde
What of Art?
-It is a malady.
Love?
-An Illusion.
Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
What are you?
-To define is to limit. -- Oscar Wilde
The world hates Individualism. -- Oscar Wilde
When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. -- Oscar Wilde
The basis of every scandal is immoral certainty. -- Oscar Wilde
I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips -- Oscar Wilde
Where your life leads you, you must go -- Oscar Wilde
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect. -- Oscar Wilde
What of Art?' she asked
'It is a malody.'
'Love?'
'Illusion'
'Religion?'
'A fashionable substitute for belief.'
'What are you?'
'To define is to limit -- Oscar Wilde
It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind. -Algernon -- Oscar Wilde
I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist. -- Oscar Wilde
Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. -- Oscar Wilde
I think thy spirit hath passed away
From these white cliffs and high-embattled towers;
This gorgeous fiery-coloured world of ours
Seems fallen into ashes dull and grey -- Oscar Wilde
But why he said so strange a thing No Warder dared to ask: For he to whom a watcher's doom Is given as his task, Must set a lock upon his lips, And make his face a mask. -- Oscar Wilde
In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust. -- Oscar Wilde
He was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the high indifference of joy. -- Oscar Wilde
For all men kill the thing they love -- 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
I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me -- Oscar Wilde
As yet, Bernard Shaw hasn't become prominent enough to have any enemies, but none of his friends like him. -- Oscar Wilde
The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful. -- Oscar Wilde
Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train. -- Oscar Wilde
Your days are your sonnets. -- Oscar Wilde
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. -- Oscar Wilde
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise -- Oscar Wilde
My dear fellow, the way you flirt with Gwendolen is perfectly disgraceful. It is almost as disgraceful as the way Gwendolen flirts with you. -- Oscar Wilde
The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life. -- Oscar Wilde
Life at times loses its sense of reality; it appears to us like a weird, optical illusion - a phantasmagoric bubble that will disappear at the slightest breath. -- 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
But neither milk-white rose nor red
May bloom in prison air;
The shard, the pebble, and the flint,
Are what they give us there:
For flowers have been known to heal
A common man's despair. -- Oscar Wilde
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others. -- Oscar Wilde
Life cannot be written; life can only be lived. -- Oscar Wilde
I have been right, Basil, haven't I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare's plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth. -- Oscar Wilde
Pray do! I think that whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid. -- Oscar Wilde
The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. -- Oscar Wilde
was some foul parody, some infamous ignoble satire. He had never done that. Still, -- Oscar Wilde
Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly. -- Oscar Wilde
It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. -- Oscar Wilde
The renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning - poisoning by a helmet and by a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jeweled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain. Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. -- Oscar Wilde
Alas, I am dying beyond my means. -- Oscar Wilde
I like looking at geniuses and listening to beautiful people. -- Oscar Wilde
You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know. -- Oscar Wilde
I had trod the road which Dante treading saw the suns of seven circles shine, -- Oscar Wilde
We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent. -- Oscar Wilde
The youth of America is their oldest tradition. -- Oscar Wilde
No artist has ethical sympathies. -- Oscar Wilde
Fruitcake is like semen, there's a lot of it about but no one wants to swallow it -- Oscar Wilde
The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude. -- Oscar Wilde
It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors. -- Oscar Wilde
Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant. -- Oscar Wilde
Men as a rule love with their eyes, woman with their ears. -- Oscar Wilde
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III) -- Oscar Wilde
Who are you?" he said.
"I am the Happy Prince."
"Why are you weeping then?" asked the swallow; "you have quite drenched me. -- Oscar Wilde
If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first. -- Oscar Wilde
And suddenly the moon withdraws her sickle from the lightening skies, and to her sombre cavern flies, wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze. -- Oscar Wilde
One pale woman all alone,
The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone. -- Oscar Wilde
Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world's tongue. -- Oscar Wilde
I am afraid he has one of those terribly weak natures that are susceptible to influence. -- Oscar Wilde
He wants to enslave you.'
'I shudder at the thought of being free. -- Oscar Wilde
Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't care about the London season! It is too matrimonial. People are either hunting for husbands, or hiding from them. -- Oscar Wilde
I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations. -- Oscar Wilde
Rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians. -- Oscar Wilde
Robert, how could you have sold yourself for money?
I did not sell myself for money. I bought success at a great price. That is all. -- Oscar Wilde
The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality. -- Oscar Wilde
She has the fascinating tyranny of youth, and the astonishing courage of innocence. -- Oscar Wilde
I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection. -- Oscar Wilde
Selfishness is not living your life as you wish to live it. Selfishness is wanting others to live their lives as you wish them to. -- Oscar Wilde
Ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl ... I have ever met since ... I met you. -- Oscar Wilde
He rides in the row at ten o clock in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night of the season. You don't call that leading an idle life, do you? -- Oscar Wilde
I don't think that you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly. Hopelessly doesn't seem to make much sense, does it? -- Oscar Wilde
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. -- Oscar Wilde
Love - well, not love at first sight, but love at the end of the season, which is so much more satisfactory. -- Oscar Wilde
Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us. Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn't possibly have happened. I believe that Memory is responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends us. -- Oscar Wilde
A prison wall was round us both, Two outcast men we were: The world had thrust us from its heart, And God from out His care: And the iron gin that waits for Sin Had caught us in its snare. -- Oscar Wilde
Kind words are lime to snare our enemies! I hold you in the hollow of my hand and have no need to waste kind words. -- Oscar Wilde
Cecily: "Miss Prism says that all good looks are a snare"
Algernon: "They are a snare that every sensible man would like to be caught in."
Cecily: "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
All good looks are a snare. They are a snare that every sensible man would like to be caught in. -- 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. -- 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
The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it. -- Oscar Wilde
The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability. -- 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 have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out. -- Oscar Wilde
Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. -- Oscar Wilde
Most people are boring and stupid. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, I love London Society! It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be. -- Oscar Wilde
then suddenly become fascinated by some one else. He would be a wonderful study. -- Oscar Wilde
You are not listening to a word I am saying ... and I am making the most delightful plans for your future. -- Oscar Wilde
There seemed to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance. -- Oscar Wilde
The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company. -- Oscar Wilde
Like the painting of a sorrow, A face without a heart. -- 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
Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is. -- Oscar Wilde
The sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. He had never felt it before. Basil Hallward's compliments -- 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
Genius is born, not paid. -- Oscar Wilde
It may be bad manner to appear here smoking, but it is far worse to disturb me when I am smoking. -- Oscar Wilde
My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's. -- Oscar Wilde
Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working. -- Oscar Wilde
Hallward. Had he gone to his aunt's, he would have -- Oscar Wilde
Yes, I am a thorough republican. No other form of government is so favorable to the growth of art ... because of the importance it places on the individual, their liberty, self-expression, creativity, and personal responsibility. -- Oscar Wilde
The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach. -- Oscar Wilde
The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical. -- Oscar Wilde
Some things are more precious because they don't last long. -- Oscar Wilde
Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. -- Oscar Wilde
When Tommy wants to be romantic he talks to one just like a doctor. -- Oscar Wilde
Nearly always in Dutch painting and often in the works of Giorgione or Titian, it is entirely independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject, a kind of form and choice in workmanship which is itself entirely satisfying, and is (as the Greeks would say) an end in itself. -- Oscar Wilde
We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks. -- Oscar Wilde
So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way,
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, don't cough, Ernest. When one is dictating one should speak fluently and not cough. Besides, I don't know how to spell a cough. -- Oscar Wilde
The basis of optimism is sheer terror. -- Oscar Wilde
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. -- Oscar Wilde
The wind had blown the fog away, and the sky was like a monstrous peacock's tail, starred with myriads of golden eyes. -- Oscar Wilde
That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance. -- Oscar Wilde
Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer. -- Oscar Wilde
A woman's life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. -- Oscar Wilde
Hatred is blind, as well as love. -- Oscar Wilde
Harry spends his days in saying what is incredible, and his evenings in doing what is improbable. Just the sort of life I would like to lead. -- Oscar Wilde
Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality. -- Oscar Wilde
A process which makes one rogue cleverer than another. -- Oscar Wilde
It is a much cleverer thing to talk nonsense than to listen to it. -- Oscar Wilde
There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. -- Oscar Wilde
By the artificial separation of soul and body men have invented a Realism that is vulgar and an Idealism that is void. -- Oscar Wilde
The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. -- Oscar Wilde
If you want to be witty, say what you think at all times -- 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
The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. -- Oscar Wilde
I never liked to kick or be kicked. -- Oscar Wilde
A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen. -- Oscar Wilde
Its a beautiful woman's fate to be the subject of conversation where ever she goes -- Oscar Wilde
Our proverbs want rewriting. They were made in winter, and it is summer now; spring-time for me, I think, a very dance of blossoms in blue skies. -- Oscar Wilde
Why was I born with such contemporaries? -- Oscar Wilde
I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of someone older than yourself. That is always a dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit, you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development. -- Oscar Wilde
A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle. -- Oscar Wilde
All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of. -- Oscar Wilde
The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all. -- Oscar Wilde
Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine non sum dignus should be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it. -- Oscar Wilde
Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid.
Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd. -- 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
Jack: "Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?"
Gwendolen: "I can. For I feel that you are sure to change. -- Oscar Wilde
The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigenia, washes away the stains and wounds of the world. -- Oscar Wilde
Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other. -- Oscar Wilde
Sin is the only color- element left in modern life. -- Oscar Wilde
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability. -- Oscar Wilde
There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. -- Oscar Wilde
I never play cricket. It requires one to assume such indecent postures. -- Oscar Wilde
[Christ] pointed out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and ceremonies. -- Oscar Wilde
More women grow old nowadays through the faithfulness of their admirers than through anything else. -- Oscar Wilde
But love is not
fashionable any more, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much
about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True
love suffers, and is silent. -- Oscar Wilde
To introduce real people into a novel or a play is a sign of an unimaginative mind, a coarse, untutored observation and an entire absence of style. -- Oscar Wilde
The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake. -- Oscar Wilde
I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere. -- Oscar Wilde
To eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, -- Oscar Wilde
All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death. -- Oscar Wilde
Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. -- Oscar Wilde
Always keep love in your heart. -- Oscar Wilde
If you do not love me, say, nonetheless, you do, for on your tongue falsehood for very shame would turn to truth. -- Oscar Wilde
What does money matter? Love is more than money. -- 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
One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry. -- Oscar Wilde
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. -- Oscar Wilde
Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you. -- Oscar Wilde
keep love in your heart -- Oscar Wilde
Ah, my dear Basil, that is exactly why I can feel it. Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies. And -- Oscar Wilde
Love is a misunderstanding between two fools. -- Oscar Wilde
But surely it is something to have been
The best beloved for a little while,
To have walked hand in hand with Love, and seen
His purple wings flit once across thy smile. -- Oscar Wilde
Her love was trembling in laughter on her lips. -- Oscar Wilde
When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her. -- Oscar Wilde
Never love anybody who treats you like you're ordinary. -- Oscar Wilde
When you really want love you will
find it waiting for you. -- 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
Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it. -- 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
Talk to a woman as if you loved her, and to a man as if he bored you. -- Oscar Wilde
A kiss may ruin a human life -- Oscar Wilde
He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals. -- Oscar Wilde
Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window. -- Oscar Wilde
The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring. -- Oscar Wilde
The one advantage of playing with fire, Lady Caroline, is that one never gets even singed. It is the people who don't know how to play with it who get burned up. -- Oscar Wilde
I give the truths of tomorrow."
"I prefer the mistakes of today," she answered. -- Oscar Wilde
If people were meant to be nude, they would have been born this way. -- Oscar Wilde
But I don't want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that, Uncle George, and I never pay mine -- Oscar Wilde
Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary charm in them, sometimes. -- Oscar Wilde
The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair. -- Oscar Wilde
Yes, the lad was premature. He was gathering his harvest while it was yet spring. -- Oscar Wilde
If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him. -- Oscar Wilde
Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues. And what is the result? You all go over like ninepins - one after the other. -- Oscar Wilde
Which Painters hold, and such the heritage This gentle solemn Spirit doth possess, Being a better mirror of his age In all his pity, love, and weariness, Than those who can but copy common things, And leave the Soul unpainted with its mighty questionings. But -- Oscar Wilde
For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? There had been something more. -- Oscar Wilde
Read the whole book, suffer it to tell even one of its secrets to your soul, and your soul will grow eager to know more, and will feed upon poisonous honey, and make atonement for terrible pleasures that it has never known. -- Oscar Wilde
One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. -- Oscar Wilde
There was a cry heard, and a crash. The cry was so horrible in its agony that the frightened servants woke and crept out of their rooms. Two gentlemen, who were passing in the square below, stopped -- 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
The world is made by the singer for the dreamer. -- Oscar Wilde
And Sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed and cries to Time. -- Oscar Wilde
I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them. -- Oscar Wilde
An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant as the case may be. -- Oscar Wilde
It was a poor thing she felt for anyone to be born a foreigner. -- Oscar Wilde
I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement. -- Oscar Wilde
As for marriage, of course that would be silly, but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women. -- Oscar Wilde
The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates. -- Oscar Wilde
He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead -- Oscar Wilde
Meredith is a prose Browning. So is Browning. -- Oscar Wilde
Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself. -- Oscar Wilde
On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners. -- Oscar Wilde
The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty. -- Oscar Wilde
To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour. -- Oscar Wilde
Writing bores me so. -- Oscar Wilde
Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy. -- Oscar Wilde
It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true. -- Oscar Wilde
What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. -- Oscar Wilde
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. -- Oscar Wilde
I wish i could write them down, these little coloured parables or poems that live for a moment in some cell of my brain, and then leave it to go wandering elsewhere. I hate writing; the mere act of writing a thing down is troublesome to me. I want some fine medium, and look for it in vain. -- Oscar Wilde
One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends. -- Oscar Wilde
Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned. -- Oscar Wilde
Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. -- Oscar Wilde
I suppose one must be serious sometimes. -- Oscar Wilde
Too much work, and no vacation, Deserves at least a small libation. So hail! my friends, and raise your glasses, Work's the curse of the drinking classes. -- Oscar Wilde
and over our heads will float the bluebird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be. But before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of lying -- Oscar Wilde
One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them. -- Oscar Wilde
Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.
Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it. -- Oscar Wilde
I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. -- Oscar Wilde
I get hungry for her presence; and when I think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, I am filled with awe. -- Oscar Wilde
I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best. -- Oscar Wilde
The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses. -- Oscar Wilde
The binding was of citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates. -- Oscar Wilde
Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing. -- Oscar Wilde
There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion. -- Oscar Wilde
Demmed nuisance, relations! But they make one so demmed respectable. -- Oscar Wilde
In the slanting beams that streamed through the open doorway the dust danced and was golden. The heavy scent of the roses seemed to brood over everything. -- Oscar Wilde
The worst thing to do with success, is to boast about it. -- Oscar Wilde
Before I could answer that, I should have to see your soul." "To see -- Oscar Wilde
The British cook, for her iniquities, is a foolish woman who should be turned into a pillar of salt which she never knows how to use. -- 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
One should never give a woman anything she can't wear in the evening. -- Oscar Wilde
The best way to enjoy your job is to imagine yourself without one. -- Oscar Wilde
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one. -- 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
For not in quiet English fields
Are these, our brothers, lain to rest,
Where we might deck their broken shields
With all the flowers the dead love best. -- Oscar Wilde
It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world -- Oscar Wilde
It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done, -- 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
I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five -- Oscar Wilde
The secrets of art are best learned in secret, and that Beauty, like Wisdom, loves the lonely worshipper. -- Oscar Wilde
He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best. -- Oscar Wilde
I am a man of simple pleasures. The best suits me perfectly. -- 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
The best way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. -- 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.'
'Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry?' asked the duchess after a pause.
'Especially when one has been wounded by it,' answered Lord Henry. -- Oscar Wilde
The best way to make children good is to make them happy. -- Oscar Wilde
It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done. -- Oscar Wilde
Really the answers I get are idiotic. The entire correspondence of you and Robbie with me should be published. The best title would be Letters from Two Idiots to a Lunatic, I should fancy. -- Oscar Wilde
The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. -- Oscar Wilde
He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone. -- Oscar Wilde
I have a simple taste, only the best. -- Oscar Wilde
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best. -- Oscar Wilde
For romantic young people like he is, the world always looks best at a distance; and a prison where one's allowed to order one's own dinner is not at all bad. -- Oscar Wilde
It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman -- Oscar Wilde
Circumstances should never alter principles! -- Oscar Wilde
Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone 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
With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. -- Oscar Wilde
I have no ambition to play the part of a mother, and why should I interfere with her illusions? I find it hard enough to keep my own. -- Oscar Wilde
People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies. -- Oscar Wilde
The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral. -- Oscar Wilde
She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious. -- Oscar Wilde
It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? -- Oscar Wilde
To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. -- Oscar Wilde
And, by the way, one of the most delightful things I find in America is meeting a people without prejudice
everywhere open to the truth. -- Oscar Wilde
Life makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite. -- Oscar Wilde
Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. -- Oscar Wilde
It is absurd to say that the age of miracles is past. It has not yet begun. -- Oscar Wilde
I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction. -- Oscar Wilde
I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought: -- Oscar Wilde
The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. -- Oscar Wilde
The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people they slander. -- 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 own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. -- 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
Ah! what a nuisance people's people are! -- Oscar Wilde
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. -- Oscar Wilde
The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out. -- Oscar Wilde
There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope. -- Oscar Wilde
Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't play accurately
any one can play accurately
but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life. -- Oscar Wilde
A good friend will always stab you in the front. -- Oscar Wilde
To be good is to be in harmony with ones self. Discord is to be forces to be in harmony with others. -- Oscar Wilde
He replied, touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with -- Oscar Wilde
Every day. I couldn't be happy if I didn't see him every day. He is absolutely necessary to me. -- Oscar Wilde
There is a tiny yellow daffodil, The butterfly can see it from afar, Although one summer evening's dew could fill Its little cup twice over, ere the star Had called the lazy shepherd to his fold, And be no prodigal. -- Oscar Wilde
Rugged and straightforward as he was, there was something in his nature that was purely feminine in its tenderness -- Oscar Wilde
Experience is a question of instinct about life. -- Oscar Wilde
All excess, as well as renunciation, brings its own punishment. -- Oscar Wilde
Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which is never advisable. -- Oscar Wilde
My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produces false impression -- Oscar Wilde
Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque. -- Oscar Wilde
Self-denial is simply a method by which arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage. -- Oscar Wilde
Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others. -- Oscar Wilde
Life is too short to be in a hurry. -- Oscar Wilde
They say that love hath a bitter taste.... But what matter? What matter? I have kissed thy mouth. -- Oscar Wilde
The bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation -- Oscar Wilde
Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is. -- Oscar Wilde
The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice. Her eyes caught the melody and echoed it in radiance, then closed for a moment, as though to hide their secret. When they opened, the mist of a dream had passed across them. -- Oscar Wilde
The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork. -- Oscar Wilde
Everyone should keep someone else's diary. -- Oscar Wilde
Wisdom is to have dreams big enough not to lose sight when we pursue them. -- Oscar Wilde
The only thing in the world worse than being Oscar Wilde is not being Oscar Wilde. -- Oscar Wilde
I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so ... Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still. -- Oscar Wilde
The trouble with the lower classes is that they lack the sense of tragedy given to them by the upper classes. -- Oscar Wilde
LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.
MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy. -- Oscar Wilde
Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things.
That is exactly what things were originally made for. -- Oscar Wilde
I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner. -- Oscar Wilde
Who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes -- Oscar Wilde
I'm too old to know everything -- Oscar Wilde
We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour. -- Oscar Wilde
He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him. -- Oscar Wilde
For myself, the only immortality I desire is to invent a new sauce. -- Oscar Wilde
Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities. -- Oscar Wilde
It is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologize to one in private for what they have written against one in public. -- Oscar Wilde
Am I thy looking-glass that thou callest me knave? -- Oscar Wilde
The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations. -- Oscar Wilde
What I want is information; not useful information, of course; useless information. -- Oscar Wilde
And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, 'You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise. -- Oscar Wilde
And yet I don't suppose that ten per cent of the proletariat live correctly. -- Oscar Wilde
To be in Society is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy. Society is a necessary thing. -- Oscar Wilde
It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing. -- Oscar Wilde
VICOMTE DE NANJAC. And you are younger and more C
beautiful than ever. How do you manage it?
MRS. CHEVELEY. By making it a rule only to talk to per- Y
fectly charming people like yourself. -- Oscar Wilde
She told me of your two chief faults, your vanity, and your being, as she termed it, "all wrong about money". I have a distinct recollection of how I laughed. I had no idea that the first would bring me to prison, and the second to bankruptcy. -- Oscar Wilde
The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory. -- Oscar Wilde
If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity. -- Oscar Wilde
Art only begins where Imitation ends. -- Oscar Wilde
When I went to America I had two secretaries, one for autographs, one for locks of hair. Within six months the one had died of writer's cramp, the other was completely bald. -- Oscar Wilde
Everyone is brilliant at breakfast. -- Oscar Wilde
Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid, but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you. -- Oscar Wilde
His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion. -- Oscar Wilde
He remembered with what callousness he had watched her. -- Oscar Wilde
Ah! Happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his path
And cleanse his soul from sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May the Lord Christ enter in? -- Oscar Wilde
I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. -- Oscar Wilde
I have no terror of death. It is the coming of death that terrifies me. Its monstrous wings seem to wheel in the leaden air around me. -- Oscar Wilde
My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. -- Oscar Wilde
No man should have a secret from his wife. She invariably finds it out. -- 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
The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. -- Oscar Wilde
The gods bestowed on Max [Beerbohm] the gift of perpetual old age. -- Oscar Wilde
Fashion: by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment the universal. -- Oscar Wilde
I am Irish by race but the English have condemned me to talk the language of Shakespeare. -- Oscar Wilde
There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. -- Oscar Wilde
Every thing to be true must become a religion. -- Oscar Wilde
The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.
He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice. -- Oscar Wilde
I love acting. It is so much more real than life. -- Oscar Wilde
ravelled skeins of glossy white silk, were drifting across the hollowed turquoise of the summer sky. -- Oscar Wilde
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful. -- Oscar Wilde
Set in this stormy Northern sea, Queen of these restless fields of tide, England! what shall men say of thee, Before whose feet the worlds divide? -- Oscar Wilde
Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living. -- Oscar Wilde
The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them. They are so far away from us that only the poet can understand them. -- Oscar Wilde
By the way, Dorian, he (Lord Henry) said, after a pause, what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose - how does the quotation run? - his own soul? -- Oscar Wilde
Me, sir! What has it to do with me? You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter - a girl brought up with the utmost care - to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel? Good morning, Mr. Worthing! -- Oscar Wilde
Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. -- Oscar Wilde
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying. -- Oscar Wilde
Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth. -- Oscar Wilde
To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. -- Oscar Wilde
Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones. -- Oscar Wilde
Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know. -- Oscar Wilde
In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people ... The Japanese people are ... simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. -- Oscar Wilde
Life would be dull without them. -- Oscar Wilde
It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves. -- Oscar Wilde
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives. -- Oscar Wilde
M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. -- Oscar Wilde
The wild Bee reels from bough to bough
With his furry coat and his gauzy wing,
Now in a lily cup, and now
Setting a jacinth bell a-swing,
In his wandering. -- Oscar Wilde
I am not sorry for anything that has happened. It has taught me to know myself better. -- Oscar Wilde
For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. -- Oscar Wilde
Ah! I have talked quite enough for today," said Lord Henry, smiling. "All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to. -- Oscar Wilde
Yes," continued Lord Henry, "that is one of the great secrets of life--to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. You -- Oscar Wilde
Lord Henry: to define is to limit. -- Oscar Wilde
Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful -- Oscar Wilde
Women are wonderfully practical,' murmured Lord Henry, 'much more practical than we are. In situations of that kind we often forget to say anything about marriage, and they always remind us. -- Oscar Wilde
He gives me good advice." Lord Henry smiled. "People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity." "Oh, -- Oscar Wilde
You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. -- Oscar Wilde
Love is a more wonderful thing than art.'
'They are both simply forms of imitation,' remarked Lord Henry. -- Oscar Wilde
I suppose you have heard the news, Basil? said Lord Henry that evening as Hallward was shown into a little private room at the Bristol -- Oscar Wilde
I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel. -- Oscar Wilde
It is not." "If it is not, what have I to do with it?" "You should have gone away when I asked you," he muttered. "I stayed when you asked me," was Lord Henry's answer. -- Oscar Wilde
What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.
American novels, answered Lord Henry. -- Oscar Wilde
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us. -- Oscar Wilde
Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow on another like the withered leaves of Autumn. -- Oscar Wilde
Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive -- Oscar Wilde
It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. -- Oscar Wilde
Memory is the diary we all carry about with us. -- Oscar Wilde
Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets. -- Oscar Wilde
My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain. -- Oscar Wilde
I may have said the same thing before ... but my explanation, I am sure, will always be different. -- Oscar Wilde
No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself -- Oscar Wilde
And now, dear Mr. Worthing, I will not intrude any longer into a house of sorrow. I would merely beg you not to be too much bowed down by grief. What seem to us bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.
This seems to me a blessing of an extremely obvious kind. -- Oscar Wilde
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. -- Oscar Wilde
The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable. -- Oscar Wilde
We live, I regret to say, in an age of Big Data hype. -- Oscar Wilde
Anybody can sympathise with all the sufferings of the pal, nevertheless it involves an extremely great mother nature to sympathise by using a friend's achievement. -- Oscar Wilde
It was an ill-omened place. Death walked there in the sunlight. -- 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
As the door closed behind them, the painter flung himself down on a sofa, and a look of pain came into his face. -- Oscar Wilde
Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. -- Oscar Wilde
Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I?
Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy. -- Oscar Wilde
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. -- Oscar Wilde
I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy. -- Oscar Wilde
Children have a natural antipathy to books- handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous. -- Oscar Wilde
The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance. -- Oscar Wilde
Intuition is a strange instinct that tells a woman she is right, whether she is or not. -- Oscar Wilde
You cut life to pieces with your epigrams. -- Oscar Wilde
Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth. -- Oscar Wilde
The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. -- Oscar Wilde
When a golden girl can win Prayer from out the lips of sin, When the barren almond bears, And a little child gives away its tears, Then shall all the house be still And peace come to Canterville. -- Oscar Wilde
While to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such I think I have become. -- Oscar Wilde
Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade.
Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different. -- Oscar Wilde
The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. -- Oscar Wilde
He does not stare upon the air Through a little roof of glass: He does not pray with lips of clay For his agony to pass; Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek The kiss of Caiaphas. -- Oscar Wilde
The chin a little higher, dear. Style largely depends on the way the chin is worn. They are worn very high, just at present. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much -- Oscar Wilde
We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. -- Oscar Wilde
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information. -- Oscar Wilde
It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. -- Oscar Wilde
It's either the wallpaper or me. One of us has to go. [These were his dying words.] -- Oscar Wilde
One is sure to be disappointed if one tries to get romance out of modern life. -- 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
it. But I don't want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that, Uncle George, and I never pay mine. Credit is the capital of a younger son, and one lives charmingly upon it. Besides, -- Oscar Wilde
A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. -- Oscar Wilde
No," she answered, wondering at the harsh simplicity of life. -- Oscar Wilde
Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf. -- Oscar Wilde
Indeed, as a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else. -- Oscar Wilde
You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a a shame in a woman to be an infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or if seen, not regarded. -- Oscar Wilde
Sweet rains fall on just and unjust alike -- Oscar Wilde
The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious ... -- Oscar Wilde
Before Turner there was no fog in London. -- Oscar Wilde
The story of mankind began in a garden and ended in revelations. -- Oscar Wilde
People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. It -- Oscar Wilde
If we women did not love you for your defects, where would you all be? Not one of you would ever be married. You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors. Not, however, that that would alter you much. -- Oscar Wilde
There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped
blood even on the hand that had not held the knife. -- Oscar Wilde
If God wished to punish us, all he would need to do would be to answer our prayers. -- Oscar Wilde
The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding. -- Oscar Wilde
The life that was to make his soul would mar his body. -- Oscar Wilde
Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. -- Oscar Wilde
It is only very ugly or very beautiful women who ever hide their faces . -- Oscar Wilde
Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. -- Oscar Wilde
But she would have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her. And when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for. -- Oscar Wilde
But I didn't say he was married. I said he was engaged to be married. There is a great difference. I have a distinct remembrance of being married, but I have no recollection at all of being engaged. I am inclined to think that I never was engaged. -- Oscar Wilde
An admirable idea! Mr. Worthing, there is just one question I would like to be permitted to put to you. Where is your brother Ernest? We are both engaged to be married to your brother Ernest, so it is a matter of some importance to us to know where your brother Ernest is at present. -- Oscar Wilde
It is very wrong to kill any one[.]"
"Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics! -- Oscar Wilde
All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns. -- Oscar Wilde
Whenever life sucks, remember you're going to die someday. -- Oscar Wilde
Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. -- Oscar Wilde
Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out. -- Oscar Wilde
the mighty harmonies of Beethoven -- Oscar Wilde
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. (Algernon in The Importance of Being Ernest) -- Oscar Wilde
Surely a gentleman has a right to fail if he chooses. -- Oscar Wilde
A poet can survive everything but a misprint. -- Oscar Wilde
There is no such thing as good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral- immoral from a scientific point of view. -- Oscar Wilde
had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. I did not want any external influence in my life. You -- Oscar Wilde
And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws. -- Oscar Wilde
The truth is a thing I get id of as soon as possible! Bad habit, by the way. Makes one very unpopular at the club... with the older members. They call it being conceited. Perhaps it is. -- Oscar Wilde
How pale the Princess is! Never have I seen her so pale. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver. -- 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
With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. -- Oscar Wilde
No married man is ever attractive except to his wife. -- Oscar Wilde
It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way. -- Oscar Wilde
It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out. -- Oscar Wilde
When I see a spade I call it a spade. -- Oscar Wilde
Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief. -- Oscar Wilde
Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys. -- Oscar Wilde
If you cannot prove a man wrong, don't panic. You can always call him names. -- Oscar Wilde
We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. -- Oscar Wilde
I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice. -- 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
One he read several times over and then tore up with a slight look of annoyance in his face. "That awful thing, a woman's memory!" as -- 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
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
For, try as we may, we cannot get behind the appearence of things to reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in the things apart from their appearences. -- Oscar Wilde
You will always love, and you will always be loved -- Oscar Wilde
Education is very admirable but let us not forget that anything worth knowing cannot be taught. -- Oscar Wilde
If you care about what others think, don't become a writer. -- Oscar Wilde
was your father, and a gentleman. Indeed, he was highly -- Oscar Wilde
They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more than one life. They become more highly organized, and to be highly organized is, I should fancy, the object of man's existence. Besides, -- Oscar Wilde
Looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not. -- Oscar Wilde
While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all. -- Oscar Wilde
Sometimes we can spend years without living at all, and suddenly our whole life is concentrated in a single moment . -- Oscar Wilde
Outside the family circle, papa, I'm glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. -- Oscar Wilde
The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour. -- Oscar Wilde
I was obliged to call on dear Lady Harbury. I hadn't been there since her poor husband's death. I never saw a woman so altered; she looks quite twenty years younger. -- Oscar Wilde
Everything is about sex, except sex -- Oscar Wilde
Against these turbid turquoise skies
The light and luminous blloons
Dip and drift like satin moons,
Drift like silken butterflies -- Oscar Wilde
If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated. -- Oscar Wilde
I am off to Paris by the midnight train, and I wanted particularly to see you before I left. I thought it was you, or rather your fur coat, as you passed me. But I wasn't quite sure. -- Oscar Wilde
Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying. -- Oscar Wilde
Thing we ask a servant for is a testimonial to honesty, sobriety and industry; for we soon find out that these are the scarce things, and that geniuses and clever people are as common as rats. -- Oscar Wilde
How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive. -- Oscar Wilde
We always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others -- Oscar Wilde
For you I would throw over anybody, Duchess, said Lord Henry, with a bow. -- Oscar Wilde
If we're always guided by other people's thoughts, what's the point in having our own? -- Oscar Wilde
And all the while the burning lime Eats flesh and bone away, It eats the brittle bone by night, And the soft flesh by day, It eats the flesh and bone by turns, But it eats the heart alway. -- Oscar Wilde
My dear Hiram," cried Mrs. Otis, "what can we do with a woman who faints?" "Charge it to her like breakages," answered the Minister; "she won't faint after that; -- Oscar Wilde
There is a luxury in self-reproach. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. -- Oscar Wilde
In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us. -- Oscar Wilde
I believe that you are really a very good husband but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose. -- Oscar Wilde
Every experience is of value. -- Oscar Wilde
We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces -- Oscar Wilde
I don't know how to talk.
Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't think I shall send it anywhere, he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh -- Oscar Wilde
I must remember that a good friend is a new world. -- Oscar Wilde
We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or give our anguish scope.
Something was dead within each of us,
And what was dead was Hope. -- Oscar Wilde
O we are wearied of this sense of guilt,
Wearied of pleasure's paramour despair,
Wearied of every temple we have built,
Wearied of every unanswered right, unanswered prayer,
For man is weak; God sleeps: and heaven is high:
One fiery-colored moment: one great love: and lo! we die. -- Oscar Wilde
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
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies. -- Oscar Wilde
To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear. -- Oscar Wilde
Your cynicism is simply a pose. -- Oscar Wilde
Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose. -- Oscar Wilde
The trouble with women is, that when they grow up, they turn into their mothers. The trouble with men is, that they don't. -- Oscar Wilde
How you men stand up for each other!
How you women war against each other! -- Oscar Wilde
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. -- Oscar Wilde
Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. -- Oscar Wilde
That awful thing, a woman's memory! -- Oscar Wilde
Those whom the gods love grow young. -- Oscar Wilde
The very essence of romance is uncertainty. -- Oscar Wilde
What a laugh she had!
just like a thrush singing. And how pretty she had been in her cotton dresses and her large hats! She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost. -- Oscar Wilde
The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic. -- Oscar Wilde
Loveless marriages are horrible. But there is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage. A marriage in which there is love, but on one side only; faith, but on one side only; devotion, but on one side only, and in which of the two hearts one is sure to be broken. -- Oscar Wilde
They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too. -- Oscar Wilde
O wandering graves! O restless sleep!
O silence of the sunless day!
O still ravine! O stormy deep!
Give up your prey! Give up your prey! -- Oscar Wilde
Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders. -- Oscar Wilde
To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up. -- Oscar Wilde
But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. -- Oscar Wilde
No need to waste the foolish tear, Or heave the windy sigh: The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die. -- Oscar Wilde
Life is like a box of terrible analogies ... -- Oscar Wilde
Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain. -- Oscar Wilde
As he passed out, he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn grating the true story of their lives. -- Oscar Wilde
There was a rustle of chirruping sparrows in the green lacquer leaves of the ivy, and the blue cloud-shadows chased themselves across the grass like swallows. -- Oscar Wilde
Practice precedes perfection. -- Oscar Wilde
I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure.
I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. -- Oscar Wilde
I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand -- Oscar Wilde
As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted. -- 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
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
Oh, he occasionally takes an alcoholiday. -- Oscar Wilde
The only sin is stupidity. -- Oscar Wilde
Valet had reminded him several times of the lateness of the hour, he got up, and going into the next room, placed the book on the little Florentine table that always stood -- Oscar Wilde
Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it. -- Oscar Wilde
Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written. -- Oscar Wilde
Every single work of art is the fulfillment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image. -- Oscar Wilde
Let those who have not walked as we have done,
In the red fire of passion, those whose lives
Are dull and colourless, in a word let those,
If any such there be, who have not loved,
Cast stones against you -- Oscar Wilde
No, as far as I am concerned, let your wife cherish the memory of this dead, stainless mother. Why should I interfere with her illusions? -- Oscar Wilde
I think after Christmas would be better for publication: I am hardly a Christmas present. -- Oscar Wilde
MRS ARBUTHNOT For me the world is shriveled to a palm's breath, and where I walk there are thorns.
HESTER It shall not be so. We shall somewhere find green valleys and fresh waters, and if we weep, well, we shall weep together. -- Oscar Wilde
It is so easy to convince others; it is so difficult to convince oneself. -- Oscar Wilde
Never mind what I say, Robert! I am always saying what I shouldn't say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. -- Oscar Wilde
There is nothing like race, is there? -- Oscar Wilde
Ruin followed, like the echo of a bitter cry, or the shadow that hunts with the beast of prey. -- Oscar Wilde
She ... can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it. -- 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
The only horrible thing in the world is ennui. -- Oscar Wilde
To look at a thing is very different from seeing it. -- Oscar Wilde
LADY HUNSTANTON Lord Illingworth, you don't think that uneducated people should be allowed to have votes?
LORD ILLINGWORTH I think they are the only people who should. -- Oscar Wilde
I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse. -- Oscar Wilde
You can fake intelligence, but you can't fake wit. -- Oscar Wilde
whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine--the son -- Oscar Wilde
One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead. -- Oscar Wilde
St. Paul's
Loomed like a bubble o'er the town. -- Oscar Wilde
There is only good art and mediocre art. -- Oscar Wilde
When is she Sibyl Vane?" "Never. -- Oscar Wilde
What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. -- Oscar Wilde
Some temptations are so great it takes great courage to yield to them. -- Oscar Wilde
You know I have loved him always.
But we are very poor.
Who, being loved, is poor? Oh, no one. I hate my riches. They are a burden ... -- Oscar Wilde
Alone, and without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all. -- Oscar Wilde
Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. -- Oscar Wilde
Poets know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions. -- Oscar Wilde
confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words." "It was a very disappointing -- Oscar Wilde
All bad art is the result of good intentions. -- Oscar Wilde
Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. -- 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
Learn to differentiate between ignorance and stupidity. -- Oscar Wilde
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. -- Oscar Wilde
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. -- Oscar Wilde
It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves. -- Oscar Wilde
Do not forget that small daily actions do or undo character. -- Oscar Wilde
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed. -- Oscar Wilde
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations. -- Oscar Wilde
It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.
It is when we are wounded by our own hands that love should come to cure us.
Else what use is love at all? -- Oscar Wilde
She laughed again. Her teeth showed like white seeds in a scarlet fruit. -- Oscar Wilde
The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty, -- Oscar Wilde
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out. -- 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
The history of women is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts. -- Oscar Wilde
When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon -- Oscar Wilde
Ah! this morning! You have lived since then. -- Oscar Wilde
malady of reverie. -- Oscar Wilde
What sort of life would his be if, day and night, shadows of his crime were to peer at him from silent corners, to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his ear as he sat at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay asleep! -- Oscar Wilde
Early in life she had discovered the important truth that nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion; and by a series of reckless escapades, half of them quite harmless, she had acquired all the privileges of a personality. -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving invitations. -- Oscar Wilde
The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole. -- Oscar Wilde
These days man knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't see anybody here to-night whom one could possibly call a serious purpose. -- 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
If I hadn't believed it, then I wouldn't have seen it -- Oscar Wilde
A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime. -- Oscar Wilde
out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star, there is pain -- Oscar Wilde
She was free in her prison of passion. -- Oscar Wilde
How ugly it all was! And how horribly real ugliness made things! He felt a little annoyed with Lord Henry for having -- Oscar Wilde
God, bless me with luxury. Necessities I can do without. -- Oscar Wilde
Nature: a place where birds fly around uncooked -- Oscar Wilde
Foxhunting ... the unspeakable pursuing the inedible. -- Oscar Wilde
But above all things was it a return to Nature - that formula which seems to suit so many and such diverse movements: they would draw and paint nothing but what they saw, they would try and imagine things as they really happened. -- Oscar Wilde
It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. - Oscar Wilde (Chuck Palahniuk - Pygmy) -- Oscar Wilde
Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. -- Oscar Wilde
As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself. -- Oscar Wilde
We women adore failures. They lean on us. -- Oscar Wilde
Liberty is the chosen
resort of the artistic
shopper. -- Oscar Wilde
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. -- Oscar Wilde
And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn. -- Oscar Wilde
Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous. -- Oscar Wilde
If it took Labouchere three columns to prove that I was forgotten, then there is no difference between fame and obscurity. -- Oscar Wilde
My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly!
You didn't know it then-you know it now. -- 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
I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours. -- Oscar Wilde
I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous. -- Oscar Wilde
people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me. Dorian Gray -- Oscar Wilde
What o'clock is it, Victor? asked Dorian Gray, sleepily. -- Oscar Wilde
Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, -- Oscar Wilde
I was dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I -- Oscar Wilde
It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, -- Oscar Wilde
The world is a stage and the play is badly cast. -- Oscar Wilde
It's beauty that captures your attention; personality that captures your heart.. -- Oscar Wilde
It was to tell him that he was engaged to be married to Sibyl Vane. -- Oscar Wilde
Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are. -- Oscar Wilde
There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad. -- Oscar Wilde
Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm. -- Oscar Wilde
If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. But if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. -- Oscar Wilde
It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected. -- Oscar Wilde
I have a business appointment that I am anxious ... to miss. -- 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
The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history. -- Oscar Wilde
Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor. -- Oscar Wilde
When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, no doubt the cod is a splendid swimmer - admirable for swimming purposes but not for eating. -- Oscar Wilde
If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you. -- Oscar Wilde
The great events of the world take place in the brain ... -- Oscar Wilde
of the purely sensuous instinct of boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination, changed into something that seemed to the lad himself to be remote from sense, and was for that -- Oscar Wilde
It is he who has broken the bond of marriage - not I. I only break its bondage. -- Oscar Wilde
Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty. -- Oscar Wilde
There was a silence. The evening darkened in the room. Noiselessly and with silver feet the shadows crept in from the garden. The colours faded wearily out of things. -- Oscar Wilde
I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result. -- Oscar Wilde
What is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? -- Oscar Wilde
Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good. -- Oscar Wilde
When I see a spade, I call it a spade. I'm glad to say I have never seen a spade. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use it. It's the only thing he's fit for. -- Oscar Wilde
The only link between Literature and the Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play. -- Oscar Wilde
As I lounged in the Park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at everyone who passed me, and wonder, with mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror. -- Oscar Wilde
He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvelous and evil so full of subtlety. -- Oscar Wilde
To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much. The goodness of the Papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity. -- Oscar Wilde
I suppose because we have no ruins and no curiosities, said Virginia satirically. -- Oscar Wilde
For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners. -- Oscar Wilde
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know. -- Oscar Wilde
Sphinxes without secrets. -- Oscar Wilde
Every woman is a rebel. -- Oscar Wilde
When people talk to me about the weather, I always feel they mean something else. -- Oscar Wilde
Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life. -- Oscar Wilde
He who would be free,' says a fine thinker, 'must not conform.' And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of over-fed barbarism amongst us. -- Oscar Wilde
When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. it is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life. -- Oscar Wilde
If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me. -- Oscar Wilde
Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to "Tannhauser" and seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul. -- Oscar Wilde
Admit that I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good. -- Oscar Wilde
The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. -- Oscar Wilde
Robert, men can love what is beneath them - things unworthy, stained, dishonoured. We women worship when we love; and when we lose our worship, we lose everything. -- Oscar Wilde
The great things of life are what they seem to be, and for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, are often difficult to interpret. But the little things of life are symbols. We receive our bitter lessons most easily through them. -- Oscar Wilde
The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves. -- Oscar Wilde
Ones own soul, and the passions of one's friends - those were the fascinating things in life. -- Oscar Wilde
LORD ILLINGWORTH. The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. LADY -- Oscar Wilde
And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine
Burned like the ruby fire set
In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine,
Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate,
Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet
With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine. -- Oscar Wilde
It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons. -- Oscar Wilde
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else. -- Oscar Wilde
Deliver me from my disciples! -- Oscar Wilde
Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal. -- Oscar Wilde
The truth is never pure and rarely simple. -- 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
Gwendolen. How absurd to talk of the equality of the sexes! Where questions of self-sacrifice are concerned, men are infinitely beyond us. -- Oscar Wilde
MRS. ARBUTHNOT. When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also. LORD -- Oscar Wilde
Sincerity is the last refuge of the shallow. -- Oscar Wilde
Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood. -- Oscar Wilde
Tell me, when you are alone with him [ Max Beerbohm ] Sphinx, does he take off his face and reveal his mask? -- Oscar Wilde
My own personality has become a burden to me. I want to escape, to go away, to forget. -- Oscar Wilde
The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar. -- Oscar Wilde
Quite so," answered the young lord. "It is the problem of slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves. -- Oscar Wilde
Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away -- Oscar Wilde
Every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim. -- Oscar Wilde
Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable -- Oscar Wilde
She is a peacock in everything but beauty! -- 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
Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes see nothing save their own unlovely woe, Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know ... -- Oscar Wilde
Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece? -- 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
Nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know good in anything until you have torn the heart out of it by excess. -- Oscar Wilde
The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians. -- Oscar Wilde
Yet each man kills the things he loves -- Oscar Wilde
Everybody one meets is a paradox nowadays. It is a great bore. It makes society so obvious. -- Oscar Wilde
I asked her whether, like Marguerite de Navarre, she had their hearts embalmed and hung at her girdle. She told me she didn't, because none of them had had any hearts at all. -- Oscar Wilde
LORD ILLINGWORTH What do you think she'd do if I kissed her?
MRS ALLONBY Either marry you, or strike you across the face with her glove. What would you do if she struck you across the face with her glove?
LORD ILLINGWORTH Fall in love with her, probably. -- Oscar Wilde
Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? -- Oscar Wilde
The is nothing that art cannot express -- Oscar Wilde
Once in New York, you are sure to be a great success. I know lots of people there who would give a hundred thousand dollars to have a grandfather, and much more than that to have a family ghost. -- Oscar Wilde
Excusing himself for this taint of industry on the ground that the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth. -- Oscar Wilde
Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there. -- Oscar Wilde
The worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, -- Oscar Wilde
I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children. -- Oscar Wilde
Examinations consist of the foolish asking questions the wise cannot answer -- Oscar Wilde
The Bostonians take their learning too sadly: culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their "Hub," as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. -- Oscar Wilde
Soul and body, body and soul
how mysterious they were! -- Oscar Wilde
He made me see what Life is, and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than both. -- Oscar Wilde
Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar -- Oscar Wilde
For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. -- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy is like a normal personal organizer, but it's smaller than a matchbox. -- Oscar Wilde
Some red star had come too close to the earth. -- Oscar Wilde
It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was. -- Oscar Wilde
I am afraid that she is a coquette, for she is always flirting with the wind. -- Oscar Wilde
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. -- Oscar Wilde
But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are. -- Oscar Wilde
Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that. -- Oscar Wilde
California is an Italy without its art. -- Oscar Wilde
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions. -- Oscar Wilde
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
There is no man who is not, at each moment, what he has been and what he will be. -- Oscar Wilde
And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of Spring,
And the rose-bud breaks into pink on the climbing briar,
And the crocus-bed is a quivering moon of fire
Girdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring. -- Oscar Wilde
Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence. -- Oscar Wilde
The world loves the Saint, and Christ loves the sinner. -- Oscar Wilde
A flower blossoms for its own joy. -- Oscar Wilde
There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous. -- Oscar Wilde
Ennui is the enemy. -- Oscar Wilde
I am always late on principle, my principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. -- Oscar Wilde
I talk so trivially about life because I think that life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it. -- 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
Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me? -- Oscar Wilde
Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are. -- Oscar Wilde
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer. -- Oscar Wilde
I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after. -- Oscar Wilde
One should absorb the color of life. -- Oscar Wilde
wondered, and hoped that some day he would see the change taking place before his very eyes, shuddering as he hoped it. Poor Sibyl! What a romance it had all been! -- Oscar Wilde
But somehow, I feel sure that if I lived in the country for six months, I should become so unsophisticated that no one would take the slightest notice of me. -- Oscar Wilde
Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne -- Oscar Wilde
I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real. -- Oscar Wilde
I could never quite accustom myself to absinthe, but it suits my style so well -- Oscar Wilde
Any religion is an illusion to others -- Oscar Wilde
As he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through him like a knife and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver. -- Oscar Wilde
All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life. -- Oscar Wilde
He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself. -- Oscar Wilde
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about. -- Oscar Wilde
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. -- 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 moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you. -- Oscar Wilde
Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks. -- 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
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. -- Oscar Wilde
Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never happened or couldn't possibly have happened. -- Oscar Wilde
No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him ... As for the virtuous poor ... they have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very poor pottage. -- Oscar Wilde
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it. -- Oscar Wilde
Your vanity is ridiculous, your conduct an outrage, and your presence in my garden utterly absurd -- Oscar Wilde
Out of the black cave of time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin. -- Oscar Wilde
To live in this world is a rare thing; most people just exist. -- Oscar Wilde
Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire. -- Oscar Wilde
Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments -- Oscar Wilde
I put all my talent into my works; I put my genius into my life -- Oscar Wilde
George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar. -- Oscar Wilde
The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also. -- Oscar Wilde
Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread. -- Oscar Wilde
Doom that walks always swiftly, because she goes to the shedding of blood -- Oscar Wilde
The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful. -- Oscar Wilde
The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water. -- Oscar Wilde
Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such
a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. -- Oscar Wilde
A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection. -- Oscar Wilde
It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. -- Oscar Wilde
One of those middle-aged mediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies, but are thoroughly disliked by their friends; -- 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
To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies. -- Oscar Wilde
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. -- Oscar Wilde
What on earth you are serious about I haven't got the remotest idea. About everything, I should fancy. You have such an absolutely trivial nature. -- Oscar Wilde
Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important. -- Oscar Wilde
A rose shook in her blood and shadowed her cheeks. Quick breath parted the petals of her lips. They trembled. Some southern wind of passion swept over her and stirred the dainty folds of her dress. "I love him", she said simply. -- Oscar Wilde
My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go. -- Oscar Wilde
We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim - objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death. -- Oscar Wilde
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance. -- Oscar Wilde
To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. -- Oscar Wilde
Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one's prejudices. -- Oscar Wilde
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. -- Oscar Wilde
My doctor says I must not have any serious conversation after seven [o'clock]. It makes me talk in my sleep. -- Oscar Wilde
The artist paints the face and body of the sitter, but in fact he shows his own feelings. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, how I vainly wished to the bearded man in the sky that I was Neapolitan. Why? So I could bring in a fine Neapolitan pest control to help with Queensberry's problem before it gets out of hand. -- Oscar Wilde
I had put too much of myself into it. -- Oscar Wilde
God made the world just as much for me as for any one else. -- Oscar Wilde
Had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk. -- Oscar Wilde
And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart -- 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
. . . try as we may we cannot get behind things to the reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in things apart from their appearances. -- Oscar Wilde
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged. -- Oscar Wilde
When a love comes to an end, weaklings cry, efficient ones instantly find another love, and the wise already have one in reserve. -- Oscar Wilde
Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty," said Lord Henry, -- Oscar Wilde
Men become old, but they never become good. -- Oscar Wilde
Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off ... p 207 -- Oscar Wilde
I don't like principles. I prefer prejudices. -- Oscar Wilde
It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produces a false impression. -- Oscar Wilde
Have some bread and butter. The bread
and butter is for Gwendolen. Gwendolen is devoted to bread and
butter. -- Oscar Wilde
All art is quite useless. -- Oscar Wilde
Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob -- Oscar Wilde
You have not realized how I have developed. I was a schoolboy when you knew me. I am a man now. I have new passions new thoughts new ideas. I am different but you must not like me less. I am changed but you must always be my friend. -- Oscar Wilde
I like talking to a brick wall- it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me! -- Oscar Wilde
The American father is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher. -- Oscar Wilde
The only thing worse than being misquoted is being sentenced to two years' hard labour for buggery -- 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
To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomat - the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know how much oil to mix in with one's vinegar. -- Oscar Wilde
Twisted minds are as natural to some people as twisted bodies. -- Oscar Wilde
The weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun. -- 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
Comfort is the only thing our civilisation can give us. -- Oscar Wilde
It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free. -- 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
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. -- Oscar Wilde
Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins. -- Oscar Wilde
The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist. -- Oscar Wilde
But I loved Narcissus because as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored. -- Oscar Wilde
One's only real life is the life one never leads. -- Oscar Wilde
My sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness can be adapted to almost any occasion, joyful, or, as in the present case, distressing. [All sigh.] I have preached it at harvest celebrations, christenings, confirmations, on days of humiliation and festal days. -- Oscar Wilde
I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words -- Oscar Wilde
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. -- Oscar Wilde
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect. -- Oscar Wilde
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't know that women are always rewarded for being charming. I think they are usually punished for it! -- Oscar Wilde
Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not. -- Oscar Wilde
It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. -- Oscar Wilde
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers. -- 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
An educated person's ideas of Art are drwan naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends. -- Oscar Wilde
Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure. -- Oscar Wilde
It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears
is said to be seen in San Francisco.
It must be a delightful city and possess
all the attractions of the next world -- Oscar Wilde
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance. -- Oscar Wilde
I'm really very sorry, but it is not my fault. People are so annoying. All my pianists look exactly like poets, and all my poets look exactly like pianists -- Oscar Wilde
What fire does not destroy, it hardens -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself. -- Oscar Wilde
If you wish to understand others you must intensify your own individualism. Why -- Oscar Wilde
I don't mind plain women being puritans. It is the only excuse they have for being plain. -- Oscar Wilde
No son of mine should ever take the side of the Puritans: that is always an error. -- Oscar Wilde
If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream. -- Oscar Wilde
The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. -- Oscar Wilde
You seem to be displaying signs of triviality. -- Oscar Wilde
There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies. -- Oscar Wilde
Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness. -- Oscar Wilde
Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity. -- Oscar Wilde
The only thing worse than quoting me, is not quoting me -- Oscar Wilde
He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good. -- Oscar Wilde
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- 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
Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide and has many marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm that possesses: my life as an artist depends on him. -- Oscar Wilde
M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life. -- Oscar Wilde
To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations. -- Oscar Wilde
I remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret of life ... -- Oscar Wilde
Not worthy! Why, the whole world is nothing to me compared with her. -- Oscar Wilde
The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. -- Oscar Wilde
What is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity. -- 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
Oh my dear fellow ... should you not be askind, 'Would the tea like the cup? -- Oscar Wilde
I was disappointed in Niagara - most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life. -- Oscar Wilde
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. -- Oscar Wilde
Schools should be the most beautiful place in every town and village-so beautiful that the punishment for undutiful children should be barred from going to school the following day. -- Oscar Wilde
There is something to me quite beautiful about her death. -- Oscar Wilde
You know I am not a champion of marriage. The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. -- Oscar Wilde
that. As long as I live, the personality of Dorian Gray will dominate me. You can't feel what I feel. You change -- Oscar Wilde
Appearance is, in fact, a matter of effect merely, and it is with the effects of nature that you have to deal, not with the real condition of the object. -- Oscar Wilde
The English public always feels perfectly at ease when a mediocrity is talking to it. -- Oscar Wilde
Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is. -- Oscar Wilde
I know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but I really can't exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it. -- Oscar Wilde
True contentment is not having everything, but in being satisfied with everything you have. -- Oscar Wilde
The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. -- Oscar Wilde
Never buy anything simply because it is expensive. -- Oscar Wilde
Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing
characteristic. -- Oscar Wilde
The ability of the theist to misunderstand a thing is directly proportional to the obviousness of the thing. -- Oscar Wilde
As for omens, 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
Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself. -- Oscar Wilde
I'm so smart, I read and understand Hegel -- Oscar Wilde
To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger, and danger has
become so rare in modern life. -- 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
Never trust a woman who wears mauve. -- Oscar Wilde
I gave my genius to my life, but my talent to my art. -- Oscar Wilde
I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so. -- Oscar Wilde
I drink to separate my body from my soul. -- Oscar Wilde
The only thing I cannot resist is temptation. -- Oscar Wilde
Whenever I'm in doubt, I ask myself, 'What would Jesus do?' And then I realize, Jesus got crucified, so maybe his decision-making isn't all that great. -- Oscar Wilde
They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. -- Oscar Wilde
Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. -- Oscar Wilde
Women have become so highly educated ... that nothing should surprise us nowadays, except happy marriages. -- Oscar Wilde
In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor. -- Oscar Wilde
Newspapers ... give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details ... -- Oscar Wilde
Then I am sorry I did not stay away longer I like being missed. -- Oscar Wilde
To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity. -- 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
The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable. -- Oscar Wilde
Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy. -- Oscar Wilde
Details are always vulgar -- Oscar Wilde
The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed. -- Oscar Wilde
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People. -- Oscar Wilde
There is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. -- Oscar Wilde
Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden."
"But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!"
"I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing."
"That may be, but the muffins are the same! -- Oscar Wilde
I don't at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited. -- Oscar Wilde
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky, -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. -- Oscar Wilde
To look wise is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier. -- Oscar Wilde
The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. -- Oscar Wilde
The ideal husband? There couldn't be such a thing. The institution is wrong. -- Oscar Wilde
If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us. In -- Oscar Wilde
One can live for years sometimes without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into one single hour. -- Oscar Wilde
To be popular I must be mediocre. -- Oscar Wilde
I tried to visit Albania but I couldn't find it on the map. -- Oscar Wilde
The Odyssey was written by Homer, or another Greek of the same name. -- Oscar Wilde
I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. I -- Oscar Wilde
In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin. -- Oscar Wilde
Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature. -- 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
What absurd fellows you are, both of you! I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. -- Oscar Wilde
My dear boy, I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. -- Oscar Wilde
I know. In fact, I am never wrong. -- Oscar Wilde
The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life. -- Oscar Wilde
Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life -- Oscar Wilde
Chrysanthemums from gilded argosy
Unload their gaudy senseless merchandise. -- Oscar Wilde
I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her. -- Oscar Wilde
I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability. -- Oscar Wilde
Personally, I have a great admiration for stupidity. -- Oscar Wilde
The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. -- Oscar Wilde
Punctuality is the thief of time -- Oscar Wilde
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. -- Oscar Wilde
I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that. -- Oscar Wilde
cannot do it," he said, mechanically, as though words could alter things. -- Oscar Wilde
Don't speak. Let me think, or, rather, let me try not to think. -- Oscar Wilde
Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace. -- Oscar Wilde
People who mean well always do badly. They are like the ladies who wear clothes that don't fit them in order to show their piety. Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical. Man -- Oscar Wilde
Bad artists always admire each others work. -- Oscar Wilde
When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy. -- 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
When good Americans die, they go to Paris"
"Where do bad Americans go?"
"They stay in America -- Oscar Wilde
I am what I am. There is nothing more to be said. -- Oscar Wilde
It is said that passion makes one think in a circle. -- Oscar Wilde
The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water. -- Oscar Wilde
I'm sure I don't know half the people who come to my house. Indeed, from all I hear, I shouldn't like to. -- Oscar Wilde
I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love. -- Oscar Wilde
In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever. -- Oscar Wilde
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years -- Oscar Wilde
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. -- Oscar Wilde
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -- Oscar Wilde
Alas! it is a fearful thing
To feel another's guilt! -- Oscar Wilde
It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners. -- Oscar Wilde
I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists. -- Oscar Wilde
The true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything. -- Oscar Wilde
Don't think I am likely to marry, Harry. I am too much in love. -- Oscar Wilde
Please, tell me the truth.
The truth, who knows the truth?
You've heart knows the truth. -- Oscar Wilde
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. -- Oscar Wilde
Life under a good government is rarely dramatic; life under a bad government is always so. -- Oscar Wilde
Besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes. -- Oscar Wilde
All great ideas are dangerous. -- Oscar Wilde
It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him. -- Oscar Wilde
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. -- Oscar Wilde
Secret to remain young is to have an inordinate passion for pleasure. -- Oscar Wilde
A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. -- Oscar Wilde
However, I think anything is better than high intellectual pressure. That is the most unbecoming thing there is. It makes the noses of the young girls so particularly large. -- Oscar Wilde
Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal.One's individuality absolutely leaves one. -- Oscar Wilde
Art should never be popular. -- Oscar Wilde
The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle. -- Oscar Wilde
I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. -- Oscar Wilde
MRS ALLONBY Is she such a mystery?
LORD ILLINGWORTH She is more than a mystery - she is a mood.
MRS ALLONBY Moods don't last.
LORD ILLINGWORTH It is their chief charm. -- Oscar Wilde
The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it. -- Oscar Wilde
Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators -- Oscar Wilde
I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. -- Oscar Wilde
Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy ... -- Oscar Wilde
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. -- Oscar Wilde
I rely on you to misrepresent me. -- Oscar Wilde
Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist. -- Oscar Wilde
The only proper intoxication is conversation. -- Oscar Wilde
It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings. -- Oscar Wilde
There can be nothing more frequent than an occasional drink. -- Oscar Wilde
Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn't know the market price of any single thing. -- Oscar Wilde
Every good story-teller nowadays starts with the end, and
then goes on to the beginning, and concludes with the
middle ... -- Oscar Wilde
A dream of form in days of thought'--who is it who says that? I forget; but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me. -- Oscar Wilde
The generation into which I was born was tedious. -- Oscar Wilde
My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all. -- Oscar Wilde
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed. -- Oscar Wilde
Murdered man anywhere. Everything belonging to him had been destroyed. He himself had burned what had been below-stairs. The world would simply say that he was mad. -- Oscar Wilde
Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile. -- Oscar Wilde
The pen is mightier than the paving-stone -- 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
It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded. -- Oscar Wilde
There being some of them who had still quite natural manners, which in a courtier is, I need hardly say, a very grave offence. -- Oscar Wilde
I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments. -- Oscar Wilde
America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle. -- Oscar Wilde
The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone - for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do. -- Oscar Wilde
I hope you hair curls naturally, does it?
Yes, darling, with a little help from others. -- Oscar Wilde
Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. -- Oscar Wilde
What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. -- Oscar Wilde
A new life! That was what he wanted. That was what he was waiting for. Surely he -- Oscar Wilde
I'm not nearly young enough to know everything -- 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
There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain. -- Oscar Wilde
It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. -- 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
Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. -- Oscar Wilde
Time is a waste of money. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh! I killed Bunbury this afternoon ... I mean poor Bunbury died this afternoon.
What did he die of?
Bunbury? Oh, he was exploded! -- Oscar Wilde
Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that. -- Oscar Wilde
The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,
made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,
danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks. -- Oscar Wilde
And when you are away, Gerald ... with ... her - oh, think of me sometimes. Don't forget me. -- Oscar Wilde
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be -- Oscar Wilde
is not good for one's morals to see bad acting. Besides, -- Oscar Wilde
Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography. -- Oscar Wilde
I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. -- Oscar Wilde
When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting. -- Oscar Wilde
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. -- Oscar Wilde
The sky was pure opal now. -- Oscar Wilde
On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure. -- Oscar Wilde
There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate - not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all. -- Oscar Wilde
Whatever one writes, comes to pass. -- Oscar Wilde
They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. -- Oscar Wilde
That is the mission of art - to make us pause and look at a thing a second time. -- Oscar Wilde
What you read when you don't have to ... -- Oscar Wilde
Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical. -- Oscar Wilde
I wrote when I did not know life. Now that I know life, I have no more to write. -- Oscar Wilde
The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. -- Oscar Wilde
I have put my talent into writing, my genius I have saved for living. -- Oscar Wilde
The job of the critic is to report to us his moods. -- Oscar Wilde
I hate people who talk about themselves, as you do, when one wants to talk about oneself, as I do. -- Oscar Wilde
Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it. -- Oscar Wilde
Let me be surrounded by luxury, I can do without the necessities! -- Oscar Wilde
Authority is quite degrading. -- 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
There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. -- Oscar Wilde
resist nothing but temptation -- Oscar Wilde
It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it -- Oscar Wilde
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. When -- Oscar Wilde
He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain. 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
The worst vice of a fanatic is his sincerity. -- 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
An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be. -- Oscar Wilde
The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts. -- Oscar Wilde
Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses - once. -- Oscar Wilde
Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered. -- Oscar Wilde
And mind you don't talk about anything serious. Nothing is serious nowadays. At least nothing should be. -- Oscar Wilde
MRS. ALLONBY. It is only fair to tell you beforehand he has got no conversation at all.
LADY STUTFIELD. I adore silent men.
MRS ALLONBY. Oh, Ernest isn't silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don't know. I haven't listened to him for years. -- Oscar Wilde
You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him. -- Oscar Wilde
As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh! 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
You must admit, Harry, that women give to men the very gold of their lives.'
'Possibly,' he sighed, 'but they invariably want it back in such very small change. -- Oscar Wilde
I can't stand people that do not take food seriously. -- Oscar Wilde
The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one's own perfection, to make one's every dream a reality. -- Oscar Wilde
One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. -- Oscar Wilde
In art, don't you see, there is no first person. -- Oscar Wilde
A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. -- Oscar Wilde
I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else. -- 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 await the revises, and promise you not to 'make my quietus with a bare bodkin' till I have returned them. After that, I think of retiring. But first I would like to dine with you here. To leave life as one leaves a feast is not merely philosophy but romance. -- 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
I have always been of opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do. -- 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
Niagara ... is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there. -- Oscar Wilde
It would be more impressive if it flowed the other way (Commenting on Niagara Falls) -- Oscar Wilde
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. -- Oscar Wilde
Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is a foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity's machine. -- Oscar Wilde
There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. -- Oscar Wilde
The universe is God. I am God so that means I am the universe. -- Oscar Wilde
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. -- Oscar Wilde
And yet it seems to me to be the one thing I have been looking for all my life. -- 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
Ugh!' snarled the Wolf, as he limped through the brushwood with his tail between his legs, 'this is perfectly monstrous weather. Why doesn't the Government look to it? -- Oscar Wilde
Tell the cook of this restaurant with my compliments that these are the very worst sandwiches in the whole world, and that, when I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it. -- Oscar Wilde
Divorces are made in heaven. -- Oscar Wilde
Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world. -- Oscar Wilde
I put my talent in my work, I save my Genius for my life. -- Oscar Wilde
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. -- 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
I'm so clever, I don't understand half of the things I'm saying. -- 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
Be yourself; everyone else is taken. -- Oscar Wilde
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
Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them. -- Oscar Wilde
Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. -- Oscar Wilde
In England it is enough for a man to try and produce any serious, beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen. -- Oscar Wilde
Pinkerton's Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent -- Oscar Wilde
No, Harry, I have done too many dreadful things in my life. I am not going to do any more. I began my good actions yesterday. -- Oscar Wilde
Of course, I should have got rid of you. I should have shaken you out of my life as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has stung him. -- Oscar Wilde
his passionate absorption in mere existence. Then, -- Oscar Wilde
The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last. -- Oscar Wilde
The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. -- Oscar Wilde
And each man kills the thing he loves. -- Oscar Wilde
Life had suddenly become too hideous a burden for him to bear. The dreadful death of the unlucky beater, shot in the thicket like a wild -- Oscar Wilde
It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams. -- Oscar Wilde
You don't seem to realise, that in married life three is company and two is none. -- Oscar Wilde
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same. -- Oscar Wilde
Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence. -- Oscar Wilde
The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic. -- Oscar Wilde
The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation, is to yield to it. -- 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
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable. -- Oscar Wilde
Why didn't you tell me that the only thing worth loving is an actress? -- Oscar Wilde
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them. -- Oscar Wilde
While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy. -- Oscar Wilde
A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain. -- 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
The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence. -- Oscar Wilde
Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes. -- Oscar Wilde
We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body. -- Oscar Wilde
I expect I shall have to die beyond my means. -- Oscar Wilde
Be not spendthrift of your honesty, But keep it to yourself -- Oscar Wilde
The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in man That wastes and withers there. -- Oscar Wilde
Everything popular is wrong. -- Oscar Wilde
Silently we went round and round,
And through each hollow mind
The memory of dreadful things
Rushed like a dreadful wind,
And horror stalked before each man,
And terror crept behind. -- 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
Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays. -- Oscar Wilde
LORD ILLINGWORTH. I never intend to grow old. The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. MRS. ALLONBY. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy. LORD -- Oscar Wilde
We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. -- Oscar Wilde
Finding the meaning of life is easy. Simply get a dictionary, go to the 'L' section, and find the word 'life.' -- Oscar Wilde
And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. -- Oscar Wilde
The moment was lost in vulgar details. -- 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. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. -- Oscar Wilde
Experience is the name we give to our mistakes. -- Oscar Wilde
Was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant. It would kill -- 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
The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth. -- Oscar Wilde
My heart stole back across wide wastes of years To One who wandered by a lonely sea, And sought in vain for any place of rest: 'Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest. I, only I, must wander wearily, And bruise my feet, and drink wine salt with tears.' Poem: -- Oscar Wilde
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better. -- Oscar Wilde
Cleverness becomes a public nuisance. -- Oscar Wilde
Here are two chairs; let us sit down and see the smart people go by. -- Oscar Wilde
The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice. -- Oscar Wilde
Some kill their love when they are young,
and some when they are old;
some strangle with the hands of lust,
some with the hands of gold:
THE KINDEST USE A KNIFE, because
THE DEAD SO SOON GROW COLD. -- Oscar Wilde
as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century -- Oscar Wilde
Outcasts always mourn. -- Oscar Wilde
Every impulse we strangle will only poison us. -- Oscar Wilde
Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place. -- Oscar Wilde
Failure is to form habits -- Oscar Wilde
Travel ennobles the spirit and does away with our prejudices. -- Oscar Wilde
We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow. -- Oscar Wilde
I lost one illusion last night. I thought I had no heart. I find I have, and a heart doesn't suit me, Windermere. Somehow it doesn't go with modern dress. It makes one look old. And it spoils one's career at critical moments. -- Oscar Wilde
I find I have, and a heart doesn't suit me, Windermere. Somehow it doesn't go with modern dress. It makes one look old. -- Oscar Wilde
Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. -- Oscar Wilde
Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the center of the city. -- Oscar Wilde
There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive. Is this impossible? I think not. -- Oscar Wilde
I'll back English women against the world, Harry," said Lord Fermor, striking the table with his fist. "The betting is on -- Oscar Wilde
Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime'. -- Oscar Wilde
But strange that I was not told That the brain can hold In a tiny ivory cell God's heaven and hell. -- Oscar Wilde
But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake. -- Oscar Wilde
The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. -- Oscar Wilde
If only the picture could grow old, and I stay young. For that ... for that, I would give my SOUL for that. -- Oscar Wilde
I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else. -- Oscar Wilde
Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination. -- Oscar Wilde
For all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell. -- Oscar Wilde
I believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the nineteenth-century standard of immortality. -- Oscar Wilde
We lose too soon, and only find delight
In withered husks of some dead memory. -- Oscar Wilde
Every one of course represents the spirit of his age, but there is an eternal aspect of the Spirit of every age which may be caught. To recreate the past from the mutilated fragments of the present is the task of the Historian. -- Oscar Wilde
AT NINE O'CLOCK the next morning his servant came in with a cup of chocolate on a tray, and opened the shutters. -- Oscar Wilde
By the way, is there any difference between 'grey' and 'gray'? I believe there is, but I don't know what it is. In one place in the poem Smithers suggests 'gray'. In others he leaves 'grey'. Perhaps he is seeing red. I believe they are sympathetic colours in spectroscope investigations. -- Oscar Wilde
Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it. -- Oscar Wilde
A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. -- Oscar Wilde
I have never learned anything except from people younger than myself. -- Oscar Wilde
The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. -- Oscar Wilde
I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good looking, and that I could paint. -- Oscar Wilde
The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling I have always cultivated. -- Oscar Wilde
The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the consequence of its work but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also. -- Oscar Wilde
Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue. -- Oscar Wilde
A lily-girl, not made for this world's pain. -- Oscar Wilde
An ex-tragedy queen named Miss Glynn, who, having no visible external ears, reared a head like a turnip. -- Oscar Wilde
Failure is only the name that we give to our mistakes.
-Oscar Wilde -- Oscar Wilde
Ah, Robbie, when we are dead and buried in our porphyry tombs, and the trumpet of the Last Judgement is sounded, I shall turn and whisper to you, 'Robbie, Robbie, let us pretend we do not hear it. -- 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
There is no such thing as a heterosexual male, only men who haven't met Oscar Wilde yet. -- Oscar Wilde
Man know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
-Oscar Wilde -- Oscar Wilde
Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it. there was purification in punishment -- Oscar Wilde
And, green or dry, a man must die Before it bears its fruit! -- Oscar Wilde
I can sympathize with everything except suffering. I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. -- Oscar Wilde
Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself? -- Oscar Wilde
The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing. -- 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
The world is a stage, but the play is badly written. -- Oscar Wilde
I find that forgiving one's enemies is a most curious morbid pleasure; perhaps I should check it. -- Oscar Wilde
There was something in the shape of his fingers that I hated. -- Oscar Wilde
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. -- Oscar Wilde
Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain. -- Oscar Wilde
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry. -- 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
Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope. -- Oscar Wilde
Lord Henry went out to the garden and found Dorian Gray burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine. -- Oscar Wilde
Tea is the only simple pleasure left to us. -- Oscar Wilde
There's no sin but stupidity. -- Oscar Wilde
Keen winter stabs the breasts of May
Whose crimson roses burst his frost,
Ships tempest-tossed
Will find a harbour in some bay,
And so we may. -- Oscar Wilde
Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there. -- Oscar Wilde
Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting. -- Oscar Wilde
The secret of life is in art. -- Oscar Wilde
The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us. -- Oscar Wilde
I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself. -- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others. -- Oscar Wilde
I should be sorry to be on the same level as an age like this. -- Oscar Wilde
The more the public is interested in artists, the less it is interested in art. The personality of the artist is not a thing the public should know about. It is too accidental. -- Oscar Wilde
America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself. -- Oscar Wilde
An idea that isn't risky is hardly worth calling an idea. -- Oscar Wilde
When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money. -- Oscar Wilde
When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money -- Oscar Wilde
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar. -- Oscar Wilde
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
Life is a great disappointment. -- Oscar Wilde
My dear fellow, it isn't easy to be anything nowadays. -- 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
You are young. No hungry generations tread you down. The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost -- Oscar Wilde
Marriage is a long, dull meal with dessert served at the beginning. -- Oscar Wilde
producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The -- Oscar Wilde
But she is happiest alone. She is happiest alone. -- Oscar Wilde
I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean. -- Oscar Wilde
There are terrible temptations that it requires strength--strength and
courage--to yield to. To stake all one's life on one throw--whether the
stake be power or pleasure I care not--there is no weakness in that.
There is a horrible, a terrible, courage. -- Oscar Wilde
Cecily: Oh, yes. Dr. Chasuble is a most learned man. He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows. -- Oscar Wilde
Something has changed you completely. You -- Oscar Wilde
married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. -- Oscar Wilde
It is personalities, not principles, that move the age -- Oscar Wilde
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster. -- Oscar Wilde
It was only in the theatre that I lived. -- Oscar Wilde
Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it. -- 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
Never so sweet a repast as the Reaper's when you tread upon the threshold of a Quiznos. -- Oscar Wilde
I am happy in my prison of passion -- Oscar Wilde
They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins. -- Oscar Wilde
Strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women ... merely adored. -- Oscar Wilde
Who is that man over there? I don't know him. What is he doing? Is he a conspirator? Have you searched him? Give him till tomorrow to confess, then hang him!
hang him! -- Oscar Wilde
When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her. -- 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
Any map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at. -- Oscar Wilde
Romantic art begins with its climax. -- Oscar Wilde
Between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if as much
as one -- Oscar Wilde
Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them. -- Oscar Wilde
Marriage is a matter for common sense."
"But women who have common sense are so curiously plain, father, aren't they? Of course I only speak from heresay?"
"No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex. -- Oscar Wilde
Any place you love is the world to you. -- Oscar Wilde
If it is not nailed to the floor, it's mine. If I can pry it loose, it is not nailed down. -- Oscar Wilde
Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. -- 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
Bad manners make a journalist. -- Oscar Wilde
No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly. -- Oscar Wilde
for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them.... -- Oscar Wilde
I am thoroughly sick of pearls. They make one look so plain, so good and so intellectual. -- 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
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
Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground. -- Oscar Wilde
If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you. -- 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. -- Oscar Wilde
I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me -- Oscar Wilde
Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be - in other ages, perhaps. -- Oscar Wilde
No man came across two ideal things. Few come across one. -- Oscar Wilde
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. -- Oscar Wilde
Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot. -- Oscar Wilde
In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization. -- Oscar Wilde
Everyone is born a king; some people die in exile -- Oscar Wilde
I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china. -- Oscar Wilde
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade. -- Oscar Wilde
My first impressions of people are invariably right. -- Oscar Wilde
What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art. -- Oscar Wilde
No civilised man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilised man ever knows what a pleasure is. -- Oscar Wilde
Anything approaching an explanation is always derogatory to a work of art. -- Oscar Wilde
Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities. -- Oscar Wilde
For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts -- Oscar Wilde
Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. -- Oscar Wilde
Always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don't flatter yourself, -- Oscar Wilde
Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is -- Oscar Wilde
As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied. -- Oscar Wilde
Love is easily killed. -- Oscar Wilde
All art is quite useless. OSCAR WILDE -- Oscar Wilde
Love is easily killed. Oh! how easily love is killed. -- Oscar Wilde
Bigamy ? It's having one wife too much ...
... Monogamy ? It's the same. -- Oscar Wilde
They actually succeed in spelling his name right in the newspapers. That in itself is fame, on the continent. -- Oscar Wilde
He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression ... -- Oscar Wilde
As a rule, I think they are quite impossible. Geniuses talk so much, don't they? Such a bad habit! And they are always thinking about themselves, when I want them to be thinking about me. -- Oscar Wilde
If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture ... -- 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
Nature is a wet place where large numbers of ducks fly overhead uncooked. -- Oscar Wilde
Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him. -- Oscar Wilde
A mouse ran scuffling behind the wainscoting. There -- 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
Put your talent into your work, but your genius into your life. -- Oscar Wilde
Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character. -- 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
A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life. -- Oscar Wilde
The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it. -- Oscar Wilde
Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other's way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say; -- Oscar Wilde
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. -- Oscar Wilde
Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him. -- Oscar Wilde
Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.
It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it. -- Oscar Wilde
You told me you had destroyed it." "I was wrong. It has destroyed me. -- Oscar Wilde
Good havens! I suppose a man may eat his own muffin in his own garden. -- Oscar Wilde
No man is rich enough to buy back his past. -- Oscar Wilde
Don't use big words. They mean so little. -- Oscar Wilde
Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men. -- Oscar Wilde
Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic -- Oscar Wilde
No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity's -- Oscar Wilde
Always be a little unexpected. -- Oscar Wilde
Some people always know the price, but not the value -- 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
experience. There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life. -- Oscar Wilde
When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy. -- Oscar Wilde
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person! -- Oscar Wilde
If we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it. -- Oscar Wilde
A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. -- Oscar Wilde
He was dreadfully short-sighted, and there was no pleasure in taking a husband who never sees anything. -- 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
What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity
became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a
malady, or a madness, or both. -- Oscar Wilde
George Moore leads his readers to the latrine and locks them in. -- Oscar Wilde
It is the duty of every father ... to write fairy tales for his children. -- Oscar Wilde
I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. -- Oscar Wilde
No gentleman ever has any money. -- Oscar Wilde
You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. -- Oscar Wilde
No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating. -- Oscar Wilde
The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind. -- Oscar Wilde
MRS ALLONBY Have you tried a good reputation?
LORD ILLINGWORTH It is one of the many annoyances to which I have never been subjected. -- Oscar Wilde
MRS ALLONBY You have your looking-glass
LORD ILLINGWORTH It is unkind. I merely shows me my wrinkles.
MRS ALLONBY Mine is better behaved. It never tells me the truth.
LORD ILLINGWORTH Then it is in love with you. -- Oscar Wilde
Define us as a sex.
LORD ILLINGWORTH Sphinxes without secrets. -- Oscar Wilde
The pure and simple truth is, the truth is never pure and simple. -- Oscar Wilde
Leave us some unreality. Do not make us too offensively sane. -- Oscar Wilde
Stand still, thou hurrying orb in the high heavens, and make this hour immortal! -- Oscar Wilde
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. -- Oscar Wilde
It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always valueless. -- Oscar Wilde
They take their punishment so well, so cheerfully: I go out with an adder in my heart, and an asp in my tongue, and every night I sow thorns in the garden of my soul. -- Oscar Wilde
There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession. -- Oscar Wilde
No one in particular. A man of no importance. CURTAIN -- 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
Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things. -- Oscar Wilde
I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked. -- Oscar Wilde
Point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath -- Oscar Wilde
The long black nights, when the moon hides her face, when the stars are afraid, are not so black. The silence that dwells in the forest is not so black. There is nothing in the world so black as thy hair. -- Oscar Wilde
In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. -- Oscar Wilde
I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours. -- Oscar Wilde
To see and hear and write brave things. -- Oscar Wilde
Suddenly I found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me. -- 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
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
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. -- Oscar Wilde
God's eternal laws are kind-and break the heart of stone. -- Oscar Wilde
Only love can keep anyone alive... -- Oscar Wilde
In married life three is company and two none. -- Oscar Wilde
A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset? -- Oscar Wilde
Of course I need not remind you how fluid a thing thought is with me
with us all
and of what an evanescent substance are our emotions made. -- Oscar Wilde
He gives me good advice ... People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. -- Oscar Wilde
All influence is immoral -- Oscar Wilde
Gray's soul had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her. To a large extent the lad was his -- Oscar Wilde
I have known everything," said Lord Henry, with a tired look in his eyes, "but I am always ready for a new emotion. -- Oscar Wilde
At six o'clock we cleaned our cells,
At seven all was still,
But the sough and swing of a mighty wing
The prison seemed to fill,
For the Lord of Death with icy breath
Had entered in to kill. -- Oscar Wilde
Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't want to earn a living, I want to live. -- Oscar Wilde
Life is too short to be taken seriously. -- Oscar Wilde
Judges, like the criminal classes, have their lighter moments -- Oscar Wilde
I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit. -- Oscar Wilde
The only way to rid yourself of temptation, is to yield to it. -- Oscar Wilde
Give children beauty, not the record of bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls, as they call history, or of the latitude and longitude of places nobody cares to visit, as they call geography. -- Oscar Wilde
He was amazed at the sudden impression that his words had produced, and, remembering a book that he had read when he was sixteen, a book which had revealed to him much that he had not known before, he wondered whether Dorian Gray was passing through a similar experience. -- Oscar Wilde
Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas. -- Oscar Wilde
The heart was made to be broken. -- Oscar Wilde
True love is just like regular love, but with more truth. -- Oscar Wilde
In love, one always begins in deceiving oneself, and one always ends in deceiving others. -- Oscar Wilde
Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance. With -- Oscar Wilde
If a book isn't worth reading over and over again, it isn't worth reading at all. -- Oscar Wilde
Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." "I -- Oscar Wilde
Don't be discouraged if your children reject your advice. Years later they will offer it to their own offspring. -- Oscar Wilde
No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists. -- Oscar Wilde
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. -- Oscar Wilde
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. -- Oscar Wilde
Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do. -- Oscar Wilde
You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one. -- Oscar Wilde
Some things are too important to be taken seriously. -- Oscar Wilde
Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all. -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, why will parents always appear at the wrong time? Some extraordinary mistake in nature, I suppose. -- Oscar Wilde
When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. -- Oscar Wilde
The truth is rarely pure -- Oscar Wilde
I ask merely for information. -- Oscar Wilde
The aim of love is to love. No more, no less. -- Oscar Wilde
Half the pretty women in London smoke cigarettes. Personally I prefer the other half. mrs. -- Oscar Wilde
I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know about. -- Oscar Wilde
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
Simple pleasures are the last healthy refuge in a complex world. -- 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
I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not. -- Oscar Wilde
I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. -- Oscar Wilde
The Noblest form of Affection -- Oscar Wilde
Thinking is wonderful, but the experience is even more wonderful. -- Oscar Wilde
Position and wealth are not everything. -- Oscar Wilde
Through vanity he had spared her. -- Oscar Wilde
And I will sing how sad Proserpina Unto a grave and gloomy Lord was wed, And lure the silver-breasted Helena Back from the lotus meadows of the dead, So shalt thou see that awful loveliness For which two mighty Hosts met fearfully in war's abyss! And -- 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
I once wore nothing but violets all through one season, as a form of artistic mourning for a romance that would not die. Ultimately, however, it did die. I forget what killed it. I think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. That is always a dreadful moment. -- Oscar Wilde
You must have a cigarette. 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
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
Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. -- Oscar Wilde
Yes Harry I believe that is true. I cannot help telling you things. You have a curious influence over me. If I ever did a crime I would come and confess it to you. You would understand me. -- Oscar Wilde
To define is to limit. -- Oscar Wilde
should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But -- Oscar Wilde
As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. -- Oscar Wilde
The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated. -- Oscar Wilde
You have a wonderful influence. Let it be for good, not for evil. -- Oscar Wilde
It would be unfair to expect other people to be as brilliant as oneself. -- Oscar Wilde
It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal. -- Oscar Wilde
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. -- Oscar Wilde
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. -- Oscar Wilde
For Man's grim Justice goes its way, And will not swerve aside: It slays the weak, it slays the strong, It has a deadly stride: With iron heel it slays the strong, The monstrous parricide! -- Oscar Wilde
She is very lovely, and if she knows as little about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful experience. -- Oscar Wilde
When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own. -- 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 neighbor with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. -- Oscar Wilde
Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. -- Oscar Wilde
Varnishing is the only artistic process with which Royal Academicians are thoroughly familiar. -- Oscar Wilde
A true friend stabs you in the front, not the back. -- Oscar Wilde
There is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage: a marriage in which there is love, but on one side only. -- Oscar Wilde
They called out. Everything was still. Finally, after vainly trying to force the door, they -- Oscar Wilde
Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry. Except in America, rejoined Lord Henry, languidly. -- Oscar Wilde
I have never given adoration to any body except myself. -- Oscar Wilde
And, as for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes. -- Oscar Wilde
Imagination is imitative-the real innovation lies in criticism. -- Oscar Wilde
More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn't read. -- Oscar Wilde
Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead? -- Oscar Wilde
We practical men like to see things, not to read about them. -- Oscar Wilde
Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night. -- Oscar Wilde
Or was the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also. He began to wonder whether we -- Oscar Wilde
What the hell is an oboe? -- 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
Lots of people act well, but few people talk well. This shows that talking is the more difficult of the two. -- Oscar Wilde
In fact, now you mention the subject, I have been very bad in my own small way.
I don't think you should be so proud of that, though I am sure it must have been very pleasant. -- Oscar Wilde
If something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land. -- Oscar Wilde
I should have remembered that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals. -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing is worth doing except what the world says is impossible. -- Oscar Wilde
What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence. -- 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
Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. -- 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
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. -- Oscar Wilde
I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it. -- Oscar Wilde
With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools' Parade!
We did not care: we knew we were
The Devils' Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade. -- Oscar Wilde
Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich -- Oscar Wilde
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
The joy of a caged bird was in her voice. -- Oscar Wilde
And once, or twice, to throw the dice is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin in the secret house of shame -- Oscar Wilde
It is always the unreadable that occurs. -- Oscar Wilde
The unread is always better than the unreadable. -- Oscar Wilde
Youth is the only thing worth having. -- Oscar Wilde
She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. -- Oscar Wilde
Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known -- Oscar Wilde
Why should there be one law for men, and another for women? -- Oscar Wilde
Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women. -- Oscar Wilde
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. -- Oscar Wilde
I am all expectation. -- Oscar Wilde
Most people are other people. -- Oscar Wilde
I believe it is customary in good society to take some slight refreshment at five o'clock. -- Oscar Wilde
Utterly, irrevocably, lost -- Oscar Wilde
Either this wallpaper goes, or I do. -- Oscar Wilde
A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life. -- Oscar Wilde
Lord Henry, you are quite delightful and dreadfully demoralizing. -- Oscar Wilde
Reforms in Russia are very tragic, but they always end in a farce. -- Oscar Wilde
Disobedience is man's original virtue. -- Oscar Wilde
With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy? -- Oscar Wilde
As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible. -- 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
Progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority. -- Oscar Wilde
My dear young lady, there was a great deal of truth; I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important. -- Oscar Wilde
And, green or dry, a man must die -- Oscar Wilde
I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age as a form of the grossest immorality. -- Oscar Wilde
You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. -- Oscar Wilde
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious. -- Oscar Wilde
You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. -- Oscar Wilde
I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. -- Oscar Wilde
As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection. -- Oscar Wilde
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation. -- Oscar Wilde
Wisdom comes with winters -- Oscar Wilde
Conscience makes egotists of us all. -- Oscar Wilde
Lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance
And must I lose a soul's inheritance? -- Oscar Wilde
fantastic shadows of birds -- Oscar Wilde
'The Lady's World' should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure. -- Oscar Wilde
He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. -- Oscar Wilde
The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is wrong. -- Oscar Wilde
Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind. -- 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
Only good questions deserve good answers. -- Oscar Wilde
To be premature is to be perfect -- Oscar Wilde
When man acts he is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet. -- 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
Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life. -- Oscar Wilde
Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat. -- Oscar Wilde
Have I not indeed been living in a dream? And am I not now dying a victim to the horror and the mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions? -- Oscar Wilde
Colonel. Can she read and write? Peter. Ay, that she can, sir. Colonel. Then she is a dangerous woman. -- Oscar Wilde
It is only through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; Through Art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence. -- Oscar Wilde
I never change, except in my affections. -- Oscar Wilde
I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. -- Oscar Wilde
When asked what he thought of sports, Oscar Wilde replied, I approve of any activity that requires the wearing of special clothing. -- 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
It is only the sacred things that are worth touching -- Oscar Wilde
Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic - a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us. -- Oscar Wilde
I don't want to earn my living, I want to live. -- Oscar Wilde
History is a lie commonly agreed upon. -- Oscar Wilde
Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping. -- Oscar Wilde
There was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when they are suddenly awakened. -- Oscar Wilde
An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory. -- Oscar Wilde
To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still. -- 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
My one quarrel is with words. -- Oscar Wilde
Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterize modern thought, but Hamlet invented it -- Oscar Wilde
Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable -- Oscar Wilde
You fancy you to be! He -- Oscar Wilde
Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. -- 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
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. -- Oscar Wilde
Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories. -- Oscar Wilde
I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering. -- Oscar Wilde
I won't belong to a club that accepts me as a member -- Oscar Wilde
The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself. -- Oscar Wilde
The Americans are certainly hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes. -- Oscar Wilde
Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow. . . . -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing worth knowing can be taught. -- Oscar Wilde
Imitation is the homage mediocrity pays to greatness. -- Oscar Wilde
One's dreams must be big enough so as not to lose sight of them. -- Oscar Wilde
You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to every one as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn't Ernest. -- Oscar Wilde
Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art. -- Oscar Wilde
Though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something. -- Oscar Wilde
In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other. -- Oscar Wilde
Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success. -- Oscar Wilde
Sweet, there is nothing left to say
But this, that love is never lost -- Oscar Wilde
People die of common sense -- Oscar Wilde
Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful but the stupid who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity. -- Oscar Wilde
This woman is a genius in the day time and a beauty at night -- Oscar Wilde
When he [Christ] says 'Forgive your enemies', it is not for the sake of the enemy but for one's own sake that he says so, and because Love is more beautiful than Hate. -- Oscar Wilde
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess. -- Oscar Wilde
The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out. -- Oscar Wilde
Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness. -- Oscar Wilde
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow. -- Oscar Wilde
In literature mere egotism is delightful. -- Oscar Wilde
Ugliness was the one reality. -- Oscar Wilde
I left her in the forest of Arden; I shall find her in an orchard in Verona. -- Oscar Wilde
A grapefruit is ionly a lemon that saw an oppurtunity and took advantage of it. -- Oscar Wilde
Reported as Oscar Wilde's last words on his death bed ...
This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go. -- Oscar Wilde
He wanted to escape from himself. -- Oscar Wilde
Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer. -- Oscar Wilde
The moon in her chariot of pearl -- Oscar Wilde
Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense. -- Oscar Wilde
There was evidently no time to be lost, so, hastily adopting the Fourth dimension of Space as a means of escape, he vanished through the wainscoting, and the house became quite quiet. -- Oscar Wilde
Every woman becomes their mother. That's their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That's his tragedy. -- Oscar Wilde
He hadn't a single redeeming vice. -- Oscar Wilde
Shall Joy wear what Grief has fashioned? -- Oscar Wilde
I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. Tell -- Oscar Wilde
Oh, I like tedious, practical subjects. What I don't like are tedious, practical people. There is a wide difference. -- Oscar Wilde
Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary. -- Oscar Wilde
Art, like Nature, has her monsters -- Oscar Wilde
passion makes one think in a circle -- Oscar Wilde
I often take exercise. Why only yesterday I had breakfast in bed. -- Oscar Wilde
The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. LADY -- Oscar Wilde
Iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox. -- Oscar Wilde
A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people's toes. -- Oscar Wilde
Irony is wasted on the stupid -- Oscar Wilde
It would leave no room for developments and I intend to develop in many directions. -- Oscar Wilde
A gentleman never offends unintentionally -- Oscar Wilde
The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth. -- Oscar Wilde
The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action. -- Oscar Wilde
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. -- Oscar Wilde
You can never be overdressed or overeducated. -- Oscar Wilde
People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards. -- Oscar Wilde
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art. -- Oscar Wilde
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. -- Oscar Wilde
I have nothing to declare except my genius. -- Oscar Wilde
But there is no such thing, sir, as a ghost, and I guess the laws of Nature are not going to be suspended for the British aristocracy -- Oscar Wilde
I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure. -- Oscar Wilde
I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works. -- Oscar Wilde
The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial. -- Oscar Wilde
Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good. -- Oscar Wilde
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. -- Oscar Wilde
It was better to know the worst, whatever it was, than to be left in this hideous uncertainty. -- Oscar Wilde
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. -- Oscar Wilde
To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing. -- Oscar Wilde
Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. -- Oscar Wilde
To make public atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. Nothing -- Oscar Wilde
have a horrible presentiment that something of the kind may happen to me. -- Oscar Wilde
Sometimes it takes courage to give into temptation. -- Oscar Wilde
Only the shallow know themselvess -- Oscar Wilde
He was like a common gardener walking with a rose. -- Oscar Wilde
The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life. -- Oscar Wilde
The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me. -- Oscar Wilde
Any place that we love becomes our world. -- Oscar Wilde
Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world. -- Oscar Wilde
as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. -- Oscar Wilde
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language. -- Oscar Wilde
youth is the one
thing worth having. -- Oscar Wilde
Sorrow ... is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of
love touches it -- Oscar Wilde
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. -- Oscar Wilde
If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation. -- Oscar Wilde
If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable. -- Oscar Wilde
The fact is, that I told him a story with a moral." "Ah! that is always a very dangerous thing to do, -- Oscar Wilde
He has certainly not been paying me compliments. Perhaps that is the
reason that I don't believe anything he has told me. -- Oscar Wilde
And, certainly to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. -- Oscar Wilde
In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself. -- Oscar Wilde
If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person -- Oscar Wilde
It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it -- Oscar Wilde
Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building. -- Oscar Wilde
I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them. -- Oscar Wilde
A woman who cannot make her mistakes charming, is only a female. -- Oscar Wilde
A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company. -- Oscar Wilde
I would give my soul for that! -- Oscar Wilde
There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. -- Oscar Wilde
Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part. -- Oscar Wilde
A book is either nicely written or it's badly written. That's it. -- Oscar Wilde
A dreamer is one who can only find her way by moonlight. -- Oscar Wilde
The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes, -- Oscar Wilde
LORD GORING: (after a long pause) Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing. -- Oscar Wilde
Cupids laughed round it as of old. -- Oscar Wilde
I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead. -- Oscar Wilde
It is better to repent a sin than regret the loss of a pleasure. -- Oscar Wilde
You can only be yourself everybody else is taken -- Oscar Wilde
Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing. -- Oscar Wilde
What was the use of knowing? If the thing was true, it was terrible. -- Oscar Wilde
The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace. -- Oscar Wilde
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 coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason -- Oscar Wilde
It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting -- Oscar Wilde
I He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed. He walked amongst the Trial -- Oscar Wilde
No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime". -- Oscar Wilde
In a temple everything should be serious except the thing that is being worshiped. -- Oscar Wilde
The sunlight slipped over the polished leaves. -- Oscar Wilde
To become a work of art is the object of living. -- Oscar Wilde
Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. -- Oscar Wilde
Genius lasts longer than beauty -- Oscar Wilde
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy. -- Oscar Wilde
Duty is what one expects from others. -- Oscar Wilde
Art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator. -- Oscar Wilde
beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. -- 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
And Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. -- Oscar Wilde
There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be pure visionaries. -- Oscar Wilde
Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
We women love with our ears just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all. -- Oscar Wilde
The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk. -- Oscar Wilde
I am not at home to any one, Victor," he said -- Oscar Wilde
It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes. -- Oscar Wilde
Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. -- Oscar Wilde
Be yourself, because others are already taken. -- Oscar Wilde
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.
She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. -- Oscar Wilde
I have never killed anyone, but I have often read about some guy getting his ass taken out with great pleasure -- Oscar Wilde
Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. -- 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
Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil, cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair. -- Oscar Wilde
There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true ... -- Oscar Wilde
Public Opinion ... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force. -- Oscar Wilde
JACK
Your duty as a gentleman calls you back.
ALGERNON
My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree. -- Oscar Wilde
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his. -- Oscar Wilde
For I wish rather, in this lecture at least, to dwell on the effect that decorative art has on human life - on its social not its purely artistic effect. -- Oscar Wilde
I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. -- Oscar Wilde
Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes. -- Oscar Wilde
You have never been poor, and never known what ambition is. -- Oscar Wilde
The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them. -- Oscar Wilde
They were evidently people on a low, material plane of existence, and quite incapable of appreciating the symbolic value of sensuous phenomena. -- Oscar Wilde
Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight For the greatest tragedy of them all Is never to feel the burning light. -- Oscar Wilde
Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow. -- 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
I admit that i think it is better to be beautiful then to be good. But on the other hand no one is more ready to admit then i, it is better to be good then ugly. -- Oscar Wilde
I felt that this grey, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners and its splendid sins -- Oscar Wilde
America is not a country, it is a world. -- Oscar Wilde
How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in? -- Oscar Wilde
Mourning the old glad days before they knew
What evil things the heart of man could dream, and dreaming do. -- Oscar Wilde
The proper school to learn art is not life but art -- Oscar Wilde
A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written. -- Oscar Wilde
If people are dishonest once, they will be dishonest a second time. And honest people should keep away from them. (Lady Chiltern) -- Oscar Wilde
And they are unjust to us often, for when they find life bitter they blame us for it, and when they find it sweet we do not taste its sweetness with them. -- 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
I like men who have a future and women who have a past. -- Oscar Wilde
Progress is the realization of utopia. -- Oscar Wilde
My own one, I have never loved anyone in the world but you. -- Oscar Wilde
I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If -- Oscar Wilde
One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one's hearers. -- Oscar Wilde
I am dying beyond my means -- Oscar Wilde
To be popular one must be a mediocrity. -- Oscar Wilde
The world belongs to the discontented. -- Oscar Wilde
He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays. -- Oscar Wilde
When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies through the window. -- Oscar Wilde
If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart -- Oscar Wilde
Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it. -- Oscar Wilde
You know what a woman's curiosity is. -- Oscar Wilde
A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on. -- Oscar Wilde
The terror of a child in prison is quite limitless -- Oscar Wilde
Work is the curse of the drinking classes. -- Oscar Wilde
Memory ... is the diary that we all carry about with us. -- Oscar Wilde
Sometimes, the unnecessary is necessary. -- Oscar Wilde
Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live. -- Oscar Wilde
We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language. -- Oscar Wilde
chairs. We are practising for an English Academy of Letters." Lord -- Oscar Wilde
The face of the enemy frightens me only when I see how much it resembles me -- Oscar Wilde
I wonder that no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes. -- Oscar Wilde
This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. -- Oscar Wilde
Muffins should always be eaten quite calmly, as it is the only way to eat them! -- 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
For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die. -- Oscar Wilde
I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting. -- Oscar Wilde
I feel I must come with you. And will you talk to me all the time? No one talks so wonderfully as you do. -- Oscar Wilde
It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable. -- Oscar Wilde
The Lizards were extremely philosophical by nature, and often sat thinking for hours and hours together, -- Oscar Wilde
Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead. -- Oscar Wilde
What would you say, Harry, if I told you that I had murdered Basil? said the younger man. He watched him intently after he had spoken. -- Oscar Wilde
I like my food dry. Not sick, not even dying, dead. -- Oscar Wilde
This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go. -- Oscar Wilde
History is only gossip. -- Oscar Wilde
So overjoyed were they at their deliverance that they laughed aloud, and the Earth seemed to them like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold. -- Oscar Wilde
The world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you. -- Oscar Wilde
Describe us as a sex," was her challenge.
"Sphinxes without secrets. -- Oscar Wilde
Days in summer are apt to linger. -- Oscar Wilde
God is love, love is blind, Stevie Wonder is blind, therefore Stevie Wonder is God. -- Oscar Wilde
A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it. -- Oscar Wilde
You people who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others have. The only difference is that your moods are rather meaningless. -- Oscar Wilde
Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid. -- Oscar Wilde
Give women the right opportunities and they are capable of everything. -- Oscar Wilde
Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about, -- Oscar Wilde
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion. -- Oscar Wilde
Besides, every experience is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an experience. -- Oscar Wilde
Women are made to be loved, not to be understood. -- Oscar Wilde
The reason we are so pleased to find other people's secrets is that it distracts public attention from our own. -- Oscar Wilde
There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose. -- Oscar Wilde
You see, it is a very dangerous thing to listen. If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person. lady basildon. -- Oscar Wilde
Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know you were so vain; and I really can't see any resemblance between you, -- Oscar Wilde
But the happiness of a married man, my dear Gerald, depends on the people he has not married. -- 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
Flowers are as common in the country as people are in London. -- 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
My wish isn't to mean
everything to everyone
but something to someone. -- Oscar Wilde
We are all our own demon, and we make this world are hell. -- Oscar Wilde
I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing. -- Oscar Wilde
Lean on principles, one day they'll end up giving way. -- Oscar Wilde
He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. -- 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
All women are rebels. -- Oscar Wilde
Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. -- Oscar Wilde
Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right. -- Oscar Wilde
The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable! -- Oscar Wilde
Nonsense!" growled the Wolf. "I tell you that it is all the fault of the Government, and if you don't believe me I shall eat you." The Wolf had a thoroughly practical mind, and was never at a loss for a good argument. -- Oscar Wilde
A true gentleman is one who is never intentionally rude. -- Oscar Wilde
There are few things easier than to live badly and die well. -- Oscar Wilde
Two men look out a window. One sees mud, the other sees the stars. -- Oscar Wilde
Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune. -- Oscar Wilde
Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life. I -- 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 living always think that gold can make them happy -- Oscar Wilde
Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not. -- Oscar Wilde
Circumstances are the lashes laid on to us by life. Some of us have to receive them with bared ivory backs, and others are permitted to keep on a coat
that is the only difference. -- Oscar Wilde
I am always saying what I shouldn't say; in fact, I usually say what I
really think
a great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be
misunderstood. -- Oscar Wilde
Whose house is that, Constable? -- Oscar Wilde
Threads snap. You would lose your way in the labyrinth. -- Oscar Wilde
Fool, nothing is impossible in Russia but reform. -- Oscar Wilde
Women are made to be loved, not understood. -- Oscar Wilde
A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her. -- Oscar Wilde
Why is it that I can't feel this tragedy as much as I want to? -- Oscar Wilde
Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative. -- Oscar Wilde
Loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. -- Oscar Wilde
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. -- Oscar Wilde
All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is a crime -- Oscar Wilde
The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything. -- Oscar Wilde
In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience. -- Oscar Wilde
Cure the body with means of the senses and the senses with means of the body -- Oscar Wilde
It's not hard to get the ideas when they come. They just come ... it's painful waiting for them. -- Oscar Wilde
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally. -- Oscar Wilde
Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. -- Oscar Wilde
It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. -- Oscar Wilde
It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things. -- Oscar Wilde
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all. -- Oscar Wilde
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected. -- Oscar Wilde
An egg is always an adventure; it may be different each time -- Oscar Wilde
we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. With -- Oscar Wilde
How exquisite life had once been! How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration! Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful. -- Oscar Wilde
Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong. -- Oscar Wilde
strange sense of loss came over him. -- Oscar Wilde
Just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in trying to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate himself. -- Oscar Wilde
What are you?" "To define is to limit. -- Oscar Wilde
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. -- 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
I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics. -- Oscar Wilde
The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young. -- Oscar Wilde
To win back my youth, there is nothing I wouldn't do - except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community. -- Oscar Wilde
I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished. -- Oscar Wilde
The weather still continues charming. -- Oscar Wilde
Women give to men the very gold of their loves. -- Oscar Wilde
I beg your pardon I didn't recognise you - I've changed a lot. -- Oscar Wilde
A man who takes himself too seriously will find that no one else takes him seriously. -- Oscar Wilde
Truth is independent of facts always. -- Oscar Wilde
Hello, I am Oscar Wilde -- Oscar Wilde
Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? -- Oscar Wilde
Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects. -- Oscar Wilde
There is no sin except stupidity. -- Oscar Wilde
The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it. -- Oscar Wilde
Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little often share. -- Oscar Wilde
A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. -- Oscar Wilde
You are Beautiful when you are happy -- Oscar Wilde
If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world. -- Oscar Wilde
The answers are all out there, we just need to ask the right questions. -- Oscar Wilde
I walk the world in wonder. -- Oscar Wilde
The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity. -- Oscar Wilde
Everybody in American seems in a rush to catch a train. -- Oscar Wilde
Than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would -- Oscar Wilde
A burnt child loves the fire. -- Oscar Wilde
The people who have adored me
there have not been very many, but there have been some
have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me. -- Oscar Wilde
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. -- Oscar Wilde
Music is the perfect type of art. -- 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
True friends stab you from the front. -- Oscar Wilde
Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful. -- Oscar Wilde
And if it feels good ... Feel it! -- Oscar Wilde
Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history but they are usurping the domain of fancy and have invaded the kingdom of romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarising mankind. -- Oscar Wilde
But you Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvelous untroubled youth - I can't believe anything against you. -- Oscar Wilde
There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. -- Oscar Wilde
Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree. -- Oscar Wilde
The trouble with Marxism is that it takes up too many evenings. -- Oscar Wilde
And when wind and winter harden
All the loveless land,
It will whisper of the garden,
You will understand. -- Oscar Wilde
Philanthropy [has become] simply the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures. -- Oscar Wilde
Life has always poppies in her hands. -- Oscar Wilde
What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere? -- Oscar Wilde
It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously -- Oscar Wilde
But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself -- Oscar Wilde
Full frontal nudity is reserved for Adam and Eve! -- Oscar Wilde
Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing. -- Oscar Wilde
Ah! somehow life is bigger after all
Than any painted angel could we see
The God that is within us! -- Oscar Wilde
Always! That is the dreadful word ... it is a meaningless word, too. -- Oscar Wilde
As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. -- Oscar Wilde
Pleasure without Champagne is purely artificial. -- 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
Give me a red rose,' she cried, 'and I will sing you my sweetest song. -- Oscar Wilde
Credit is a young man's capital. -- Oscar Wilde
Just be your self. Everybody else is already taken. -- Oscar Wilde
The last person who ever crossed me is dead under my bed!!! -- Oscar Wilde
Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood -- Oscar Wilde
It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name. -- Oscar Wilde
Can be read without any trouble and was probably written without any trouble. -- Oscar Wilde
I am the only person I would like to know thoroughly -- Oscar Wilde
Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often, -- Oscar Wilde
Life Imitates Art -- Oscar Wilde
The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide. -- Oscar Wilde
All charming people are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction. -- Oscar Wilde
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
How does one cure the soul? Through the senses -- Oscar Wilde
If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. -- Oscar Wilde
That's an awful thing,a womans memory -- 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
I think little of pen and ink in revolutions. -- Oscar Wilde
I didn't say I liked it Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference. -- Oscar Wilde
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. -- Oscar Wilde
Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness. -- Oscar Wilde
She doth mean the earth to me! By earth, I actually mean dust. -- Oscar Wilde
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. -- Oscar Wilde
The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. -- Oscar Wilde
What a curious shape you are! May I ask were you born like that, or is it the result of an accident?" "It -- Oscar Wilde
My gods dwell in temples made with hands. -- Oscar Wilde
Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true. -- Oscar Wilde
Where there is no love there is no understanding. -- Oscar Wilde
I prefer women with a past. They're always so damned amusing to talk to. -- Oscar Wilde
Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices. -- Oscar Wilde
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. -- Oscar Wilde
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
You can have your secret as long as I have your heart[.] -- Oscar Wilde
Nowadays, we have so few mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of them. -- Oscar Wilde
In the cave of black Despair: He only looked upon the sun, And drank the morning air. -- Oscar Wilde
It is always the women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women. Except, of course, in middle-class life. But then the middle classes are not modern. -- Oscar Wilde
A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art. -- Oscar Wilde
It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. -- Oscar Wilde
A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young. -- Oscar Wilde
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching. -- Oscar Wilde
Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. -- Oscar Wilde
It was always once springtime in my heart. -- Oscar Wilde
Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. -- Oscar Wilde
If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it. -- Oscar Wilde
All trials are trials for one's life. -- Oscar Wilde
Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance. -- Oscar Wilde
Only the shallow know themselves -- Oscar Wilde
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty. -- Oscar Wilde
Every woman is wrong until she cries. -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing is so aggravating than calmness. -- Oscar Wilde
One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards. -- Oscar Wilde
It is always worth while asking a question, though it is not always worth while answering one. -- Oscar Wilde
The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. -- Oscar Wilde
The supreme vice is shallowness. -- Oscar Wilde
I have a theory that it is always the women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women. -- Oscar Wilde
Never buy a thing you don't want merely because it is dear. -- Oscar Wilde
I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful. -- Oscar Wilde
I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime. -- Oscar Wilde
In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing. -- Oscar Wilde
Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it. -- Oscar Wilde
Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets. -- Oscar Wilde
I always hear Harry's views from his friends. It is the only way I get to know of them. -- Oscar Wilde
The only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact. -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing worth learning can ever be taught -- Oscar Wilde