Oscar Wilde – 106 Quotes

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106 Quotes by Oscar Wilde

 

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

– Oscar Wilde


All art is quite useless.

– Oscar Wilde


Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

– Oscar Wilde


A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

– Oscar Wilde


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

– Oscar Wilde


The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

– Oscar Wilde


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

– Oscar Wilde


It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

– 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


No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

– Oscar Wilde


I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

– Oscar Wilde


Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

– 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


I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

– Oscar Wilde


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

– 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


Biography lends to death a new terror.

– Oscar Wilde


Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

– Oscar Wilde


One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

– Oscar Wilde


A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

– Oscar Wilde


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


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

– Oscar Wilde


Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

– Oscar Wilde


Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

– Oscar Wilde


Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.

– Oscar Wilde


I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.

– Oscar Wilde


Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.

– Oscar Wilde


The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

– Oscar Wilde


True friends stab you in the front.

– 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


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

– Oscar Wilde


Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

– Oscar Wilde


I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

– Oscar Wilde


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

– Oscar Wilde


When good Americans die they go to Paris.

– Oscar Wilde


Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

– Oscar Wilde


The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

– Oscar Wilde


Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

– Oscar Wilde


It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

– Oscar Wilde


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

– 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


Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

– 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


In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

– 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


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


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


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

– Oscar Wilde


Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

– 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


Some cause happiness wherever they go others whenever they go.

– Oscar Wilde


This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

– 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


The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

– Oscar Wilde


To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.

– Oscar Wilde


Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

– Oscar Wilde


In married life three is company and two none.

– Oscar Wilde


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

– Oscar Wilde


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

– Oscar Wilde


Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

– Oscar Wilde


I put all my genius into my life I put only my talent into my works.

– Oscar Wilde


The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.

– Oscar Wilde


Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

– Oscar Wilde


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

– Oscar Wilde


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

– Oscar Wilde


The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

– 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


Who, being loved, is poor?

– Oscar Wilde


Hatred is blind, as well as love.

– Oscar Wilde


Those whom the gods love grow young.

– Oscar Wilde


To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

– Oscar Wilde


A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

– Oscar Wilde


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

– Oscar Wilde


Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.

– Oscar Wilde


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

– Oscar Wilde


There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

– 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


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

– Oscar Wilde


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

– Oscar Wilde


There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.

– Oscar Wilde


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


Men marry because they are tired women, because they are curious both are disappointed.

– Oscar Wilde


Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.

– 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


Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

– Oscar Wilde


All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

– Oscar Wilde


A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

– Oscar Wilde


Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

– Oscar Wilde


It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

– Oscar Wilde


Success is a science if you have the conditions, you get the result.

– Oscar Wilde


Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

– Oscar Wilde


Society exists only as a mental concept in the real world there are only individuals.

– 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


If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.

– Oscar Wilde


If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.

– 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


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

– Oscar Wilde


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

– Oscar Wilde


The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

– 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


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


Women are made to be loved, not understood.

– Oscar Wilde


All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

– Oscar Wilde


Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

– Oscar Wilde


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

– Oscar Wilde