Oscar Wilde Quotes

But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.

The aim of love is to love. No more, no less.

Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.

I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.

I must say... that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.

What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true.

Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid, but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.

Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women...merely adored.

Credit is a young man's capital.

I don't play accurately--any one can play accurately--but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.

Some things are more precious because they don't last long.

The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.

Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.

You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter - a girl brought up with the utmost care - to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?

In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.

She doth mean the earth to me! By earth, I actually mean dust.

The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed.

It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country

This ghastly state of things is what you call Bunburying, I suppose? Algernon. Yes, and a perfectly wonderful Bunbury it is. The most wonderful Bunbury I have ever had in my life. Jack. Well, you've no right whatsoever to Bunbury here. Algernon. That is absurd. One has a right to Bunbury anywhere one chooses. Every serious Bunburyist knows that.

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

Before Turner there was no fog in London.

If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.

There's no sin but stupidity.

I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself. Sometimes I am so clever I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.

Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.

To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.

What is said of man is nothing; the point is, who says it.

My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip. What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

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

Travel ennobles the spirit and does away with our prejudices.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame.

A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position.

The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great.

Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.

My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.

Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success.

It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.