Oscar Wilde Quotes

He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.

There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.

LORD ILLINGWORTH What do you think she'd do if I kissed her? MRS ALLONBY Either marry you, or strike you across the face with her glove. What would you do if she struck you across the face with her glove? LORD ILLINGWORTH Fall in love with her, probably.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

A woman who cannot make her mistakes charming, is only a female.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

I'm so smart, I read and understand Hegel

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand.

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.

The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.

With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?

Fashion: by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment the universal.

He is fond of being misunderstood. It gives him a post of vantage.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.

The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Cats are put on earth to remind us that not everything has a purpose.

The universe is God. I am God so that means I am the universe.

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.

To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.

Sometimes, the unnecessary is necessary.

Nothing worth knowing can be taught.

There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is!

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Whenever cannibals are on the brink of starvation, Heaven, in its infinite mercy, sends them a fat missionary.

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.

I like looking at geniuses and listening to beautiful people.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

Most people are boring and stupid.

The only one you need in your life is that person who shows you he needs you in his.

Talk to a woman as if you loved her, and to a man as if he bored you.

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.

My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.

Pleasure without Champagne is purely artificial.

A man who pays his bills on time is soon forgotten.