Oscar Wilde Quotes

We live in the age of the overworked and the undereducated.

I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories.

Just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising and lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweler.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Life is the art of being well deceived, and to succeed, it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret.

There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them.

Nature is a wet place where large numbers of ducks fly overhead uncooked.

Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.

An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.

The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.

I played with an idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air; transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox.

It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of the world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

Now produce your explanation and pray make it improbable.

What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless.

My philosophy? I'm always right and you are wrong.

Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.

It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.

The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

If only the picture could grow old, and I stay young. For that...for that, I would give my SOUL for that.

Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex, multiform creature that bears within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh is tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

What is beautiful is a joy for all seasons.

You have never been poor, and never known what ambition is.

The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.

The English country-gentleman galloping after a fox — the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

The moon in her chariot of pearl

The birds did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.

You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.

People are either charming or tedious.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.

If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. But if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone.

Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile.

I'm sure I don't know half the people who come to my house. Indeed, from all I hear, I shouldn't like to.

Just to let you know that the buffet car will be closing for stocktaking in five minutes. The next station stop is Chesterfield.

The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.

One's only real life is the life one never leads.

The only sin is stupidity.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel