Oscar Wilde Quotes

Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them.

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.

ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl...I have ever met since...I met you.

Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.

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.

Reforms in Russia are very tragic, but they always end in a farce.

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.

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

Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important.

To be popular I must be mediocre.

Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber

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

When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.

I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.

Divorces are made in heaven.

Always! That is the dreadful word ... it is a meaningless word, too.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.

If God wished to punish us, all he would need to do would be to answer our prayers.

The only proper intoxication is conversation.

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

The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.

Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties.

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. 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. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Simple pleasures are the last healthy refuge in a complex world.

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.

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

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.

Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won't expect it back.

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.

At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America. It was not until I had seen the water-works at Chicago that I realised the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautiful rhythmic thing I have ever seen.

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!

If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.

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.

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.

Art only begins where Imitation ends.

Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.

However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive.