Oscar Wilde Quotes

Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.

The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.

I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.

Experience is a question of instinct about life.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

The problem with the common person is that he is so unbearably common!

Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never have happened and couldn't possibly have happened.

Down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandaled feet, Crept like a frightened girl.

What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.

I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.

Starvation, not sin, is the parent of modern crime.

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

The ability of the theist to misunderstand a thing is directly proportional to the obviousness of the thing.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.

The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.

Selfishness is not living your life as you wish to live it. Selfishness is wanting others to live their lives as you wish them to.

Every thing to be true must become a religion.

Judges, like the criminal classes, have their lighter moments

Oh, why will parents always appear at the wrong time? Some extraordinary mistake in nature, I suppose.

My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!

Really, if the lower orders don't set a good example, what on earth is the use of them?

Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. 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.

It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously

The only thing I cannot resist is temptation.

I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments.

One is not always happy when one is good; but one is always good when one is happy.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

I believe it is customary in good society to take some slight refreshment at five o'clock.

The true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything.

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.

If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

What of Art? -It is a malady. --Love? -An Illusion. --Religion? -The fashionable substitute for Belief. --You are a sceptic. -Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith. --What are you? -To define is to limit.

It is he who has broken the bond of marriage - not I. I only break its bondage.

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.

If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.

Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.

Finding the meaning of life is easy. Simply get a dictionary, go to the 'L' section, and find the word 'life.'

Hard work is amply the refuge of those who have nothing to do.