Oscar Wilde Quotes

To be popular one must be a mediocrity.

He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.

When a love comes to an end, weaklings cry, efficient ones instantly find another love, and the wise already have one in reserve.

Though one can dine in New York, one could not dwell there.

The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pères ont toujours tort.

The unread is always better than the unreadable.

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

No one wants to see a play called 'Lady Windermere's Fan'. It's going to be called 'Cocks in Frocks II' or I will find another publisher

sorrow...is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

It is curious how vanity helps the successful man and wrecks the failure.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.

Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art.

Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise [in the future. But only if we set out to make this true and anticipate it so we look for the blessings until we find them].

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

Reported as Oscar Wilde's last words on his death bed... This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go.

It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.

All great ideas are dangerous.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

If we're always guided by other people's thoughts, what's the point in having our own?

Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.

One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

The beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance . . . living on the memory of crushing defeats

I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.

George Moore leads his readers to the latrine and locks them in.

I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in my life.

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake.

Love will fly if held too lightly Love will die if held too tightly . . .

Education is an admirable thing.

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive.

I tried to visit Albania but I couldn't find it on the map.

For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.