Oscar Wilde Quotes

Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it.

You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.

It's either the wallpaper or me. One of us has to go. [These were his dying words.]

When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.

It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing

She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses but in all my garden there is no red rose.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.

The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1.322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26.911 words. The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

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.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes.

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.

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.

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.

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?

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

There is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty.

Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.

The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.

Give me the luxuries and I can dispense with the necessities.

I was wrong. God's law is only Love.

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.

The weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun.

It is always painful fo part from people whom one has known for a very 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.

The world belongs to the discontented.

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?

The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.

To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies.

Circumstances should never alter principles!

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.

Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.

Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.

I have nothing to declare except my genuis.

Nature is always behind the age

[T]he recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.

Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.

Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.

but the bravest man among us is afraid of himself

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us.

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.

The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.

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

Its a beautiful woman's fate to be the subject of conversation where ever she goes

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.

The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life.

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.