Oscar Wilde Quotes

Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope.

She has form," he said to himself, as he walked away through the grove - "that cannot be denied to her; but has she got feeling? I am afraid not. In fact, she is like most artists; she is all style, without any sincerity. She would not sacrifice herself for others. She thinks merely of music, and everybody knows that arts are selfish. Still, it must be admitted that she has some beautiful notes in her voice. What a pity it is that they do not mean anything, or do any practical good.

The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the dullness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange snakespotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud's building in the College of St. John.

We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, that fire can purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all.

Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly

When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting.

Misfortunes one can endure--they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah!--there is the sting of life.

I often take exercise. Why only yesterday I had breakfast in bed.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic - a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Time is a waste of money.

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

I must remember that a good friend is a new world.

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight.

The sky was pure opal now.

The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.

Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.

Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women. It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.

Let me be dressed as I will, yet flies worms and flowers exceed me still.

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.

One should always be a little improbable.

A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy.

Tea is the only simple pleasure left to us.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

What a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed Lord Henry. "Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.

Life is like a box of terrible analogies.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.

In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.... The Japanese people are ... simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.

He must have a truly romantic nature, for he weeps when there is nothing at all to weep about.

You can fake intelligence, but you can't fake wit.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.

The worst thing to do with success, is to boast about it.

Psycholog­y is in its infancy, as a science. I hope in the interests of Art, it will always remain so.

I beg your pardon I didn't recognise you - I've changed a lot.

Truth is independent of facts always.

You told me you had destroyed it." "I was wrong. It has destroyed me.

I find that forgiving one's enemies is a most curious morbid pleasure; perhaps I should check it.

Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.