Oscar Wilde Quotes

God's eternal laws are kind-and break the heart of stone.

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.

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.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art.

The best way to appreciate your job is to, is here to stay.

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.

They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.

We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.

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

I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.

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

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one's neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him.

Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.

Be yourself; everyone else is taken.

One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one's hearers.

Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

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

Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination.

Perhaps one never seems so much at ones ease as when one has to play a part.

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

One should always be in love.

To be good is to be in harmony with one's self.

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.

I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean.

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.

I expect I shall have to die beyond my means.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

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.

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

Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.

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.

If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.

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.

In England it is enough for a man to try and produce any serious, beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

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!

An egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different.

Without order nothing can exist-without chaos nothing can evolve. Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else.

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement. Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman. When one is in love one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others. This is what the world calls a romance.

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.

The world seemed to me fine because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived.

When you really want love you will find it waiting for you.

It is a very dangerous thing to know one’s friends.