Oscar Wilde Quotes

I don't at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.

Friendship never forgets. That is the wonderful thing about it.

Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art

Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.

Vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people.

If it is not nailed to the floor, it's mine. If I can pry it loose, it is not nailed down.

One's dreams must be big enough so as not to lose sight of them.

If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.

Don't be discouraged if your children reject your advice. Years later they will offer it to their own offspring.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center of pain.

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public to him are non-existent.

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.

Married men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.

The truth is never pure and rarely simple.

I never put off till tomorrow what I can do the day after.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left. ALGERNON: We have. JACK: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about? ALGERNON: The fools? Oh! about the clever people of course. JACK: What fools.

We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.

To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be.

And once, or twice, to throw the dice is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin in the secret house of shame

Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne.

I don't like principles. I prefer prejudices.

Jack? . . . No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed. It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations . . . I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain. Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude. The only really safe name is Ernest.

He hadn’t a single redeeming vice.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

Men of thoughts should have nothing to do with action.

Millionaire models are rare enough; but model millionaires are rarer still!

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleance me in the great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.

Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

There is no Mystery so great as Misery.

It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it.

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow one another like the withered leaves of Autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity.

The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Tsǔ spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things.

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting

Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile.

The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.