Oscar Wilde Quotes

With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.

He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.

Thinking is wonderful, but the experience is even more wonderful.

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.

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.'

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.

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

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.

There is nothing that art cannot express.

Progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority.

I should have remembered that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals.

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

More women grow old nowadays through the faithfulness of their admirers than through anything else.

I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.

I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.

My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter warders sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. I have had moments when I thought it would be wise to separate. Ah! Moments of weakness and madness! Now I see that would have mutilated my life, ruined my art, broken the musical chords which make a perfect soul. Even covered with mud I shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you. In my solitude you will be with me.

By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.

Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failures.

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.

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.

Life is too short to be in a hurry.

Self-denial is simply a method by which arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage.

The gods bestowed on Max [Beerbohm] the gift of perpetual old age.

I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much

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.

I have nothing to declare but my genius, and this four-kilo bag of cocaine.

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

Lean on principles, one day they'll end up giving way.

Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the center of the city.

The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering.

The best revenge is to live well.

California is an Italy without its art.

You know what a woman's curiosity is.

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.

Oh, I love London Society! It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be.

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.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old.

Tread Lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow.

[on his deathbed in a Paris hotel room] Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

The morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?

How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!

Always be a little unexpected.