Oscar Wilde Qoutes

 





Here is a comprehensive organized collection of Oscar Wilde's most famous and notable quotes, drawn from his plays, essays, novels, letters, and recorded conversation:

WIT, WISDOM & APHORISMS (GENERAL)

  • "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
  • "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
  • "I can resist everything except temptation."
  • "The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
  • "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
  • "I am not young enough to know everything."
  • "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."
  • "Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."
  • "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
  • "The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer."
  • "I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do the day after."
  • "To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect."
  • "Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
  • "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
  • "Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
  • "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
  • "To define is to limit."
  • "The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates."
  • "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth."
  • "I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
  • "The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves."
  • "Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you."
  • "I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."
  • "Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit."
  • "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
  • "The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything."
  • "One should always be a little improbable."
  • "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
  • "I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."

BEAUTY, ART & AESTHETICS

  • "The very essence of romance is uncertainty."
  • "No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist."
  • "Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious."
  • "A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament."
  • "All art is quite useless."
  • "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life."
  • "To define is to limit."
  • "The aim of art is no other than to conceal art."
  • "An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him."
  • "The artist is the creator of beautiful things."
  • "The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you."
  • "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written."
  • "The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty and to someone else if she is plain."
  • "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
  • "One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation."
  • "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."
  • "I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."
  • "Cultivated leisure is the aim of man."
  • "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault."
  • "There is only one thing worse than an ugly thing and that is a beautiful thing."
  • "Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable."
  • "The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing."
  • "The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius."

LOVE & ROMANCE

  • "Who, being loved, is poor?"
  • "The very essence of romance is uncertainty."
  • "Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead."
  • "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
  • "The heart was made to be broken."
  • "Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary."
  • "I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."
  • "A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her."
  • "Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."
  • "The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of feeling, not of emotions."
  • "One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry."
  • "Each time one loves is the only time one has ever loved."
  • "Those whom the gods love grow young."
  • "There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love."
  • "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing."
  • "Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance."
  • "Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement."
  • "When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others."
  • "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young."

MARRIAGE

  • "The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married."
  • "Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."
  • "Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building."
  • "One should never marry a woman with straw-colored hair. They are so sentimental."
  • "The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding."
  • "Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."
  • "Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience."
  • "How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being?"
  • "I am always late on principle, my principle being that punctuality is the thief of time."
  • "To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable."

WOMEN

  • "Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood."
  • "No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating."
  • "A woman who cannot make her mistakes charming is only a female."
  • "A man who does not think for himself does not think at all."
  • "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
  • "If a woman wants to hold a man, she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him."
  • "Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the two sexes."
  • "A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on."
  • "A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."
  • "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."
  • "One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything."
  • "The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain."
  • "I like men who have a future and women who have a past."
  • "Women are a fascinatingly willful sex. Every woman is a rebel."
  • "A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature."
  • "Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never have time. They are always so occupied in being jealous of other women's husbands."

MEN

  • "Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason."
  • "The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer."
  • "No man is rich enough to buy back his past."
  • "The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means."
  • "It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly."
  • "The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
  • "Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors live like married men."
  • "Men become old, but they never become good."
  • "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
  • "I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself."
  • "Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance."
  • "There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us."

SOCIETY & CLASS

  • "There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor."
  • "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
  • "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
  • "The English country gentleman galloping after a fox — the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable."
  • "Ambition is the last refuge of the failure."
  • "Work is the curse of the drinking classes."
  • "Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."
  • "In England, a man who can't talk morality twice a week to a large, popular immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician."
  • "It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
  • "The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out."
  • "Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob."
  • "As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular."
  • "One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead."
  • "The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves."

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT

  • "There is no sin except stupidity."
  • "Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."
  • "The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all."
  • "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."
  • "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
  • "As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them."
  • "In America, the young are always ready to give those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience."
  • "The political horizon looks dark and lowering; but light and colour have always been reserved for the future."
  • "High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."

RELIGION, MORALITY & THE SOUL

  • "I may be lying in the gutter but I am looking at the stars."
  • "The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."
  • "Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."
  • "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
  • "Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike."
  • "Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions."
  • "I am not at all cynical. I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing."
  • "The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone — for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do."
  • "Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons."
  • "Sorrow, then, and all that it teaches one, is my new world."
  • "Where there is sorrow there is holy ground."
  • "We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell."
  • "The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."
  • "Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity."
  • "One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason."
  • "I have a different idea of elegance. I don't dress like a fop; I dress like a dandy."

EDUCATION & KNOWLEDGE

  • "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
  • "The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray."
  • "I am not young enough to know everything."
  • "The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself."
  • "The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value."
  • "Examinations are of no value whatsoever. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough. If he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him."
  • "The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it."
  • "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."

YOUTH & AGE

  • "To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable."
  • "The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything."
  • "Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room."
  • "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young."
  • "With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone."
  • "One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead."
  • "I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
  • "No man is rich enough to buy back his past."
  • "Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them."
  • "Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot."

SUFFERING, PRISON & SORROW

(primarily from De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol era)

  • "The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death."
  • "Where there is sorrow there is holy ground."
  • "I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does."
  • "To those who are in prison, tears are a part of every day's experience."
  • "The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer."
  • "I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand."
  • "To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed image of one's suffering."
  • "I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world."
  • "I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws."
  • "Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons."
  • "Out of the depths I have cried to thee."
  • "The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease."

FRIENDSHIP

  • "A true friend stabs you in the front."
  • "The only way to have a friend is to be one."
  • "Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."
  • "Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success."
  • "I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects."
  • "True friends stab you in the front."

SUCCESS, FAILURE & REPUTATION

  • "I have nothing to declare except my genius."
  • "Ambition is the last refuge of the failure."
  • "Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result."
  • "One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation."
  • "The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic."
  • "I have met lots of people of whom I approved of and whom I did not like. I have never liked anyone I did not approve of."
  • "The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never any use to oneself."

NATURE

  • "Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
  • "The very essence of romance is uncertainty."
  • "Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope."
  • "After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world."
  • "A flower blossoms for its own joy."
  • "The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever."
  • "Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship."


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