Top 100 Oscar Wilde Quotes
#1. London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
Oscar Wilde
#2. It was an ill-omened place. Death walked there in the sunlight.
Oscar Wilde
#3. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
Oscar Wilde
#4. The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience.
Oscar Wilde
#5. For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us.
Oscar Wilde
#6. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent
Oscar Wilde
#7. Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
Oscar Wilde
#8. Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.
Oscar Wilde
#9. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats.
Oscar Wilde
#10. Friendship never forgets. That is the wonderful thing about it.
Oscar Wilde
#11. Hard work is amply the refuge of those who have nothing to do.
Oscar Wilde
#12. An opinion is not necesarily correct just because you're willing to die for it.
Oscar Wilde
#13. The truth is a thing I get id of as soon as possible! Bad habit, by the way. Makes one very unpopular at the club... with the older members. They call it being conceited. Perhaps it is.
Oscar Wilde
#14. He was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the high indifference of joy.
Oscar Wilde
#15. It is very wrong to kill any one[.]"
"Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!
Oscar Wilde
#16. If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
Oscar Wilde
#17. The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.
Oscar Wilde
#18. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with those virtues that are likely to benefit ourselves. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.
Oscar Wilde
#20. We are talking about poor Dartmoor, Lord Henry, cried the duchess, nodding pleasantly
Oscar Wilde
#21. Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?
Oscar Wilde
#22. Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
Oscar Wilde
#23. I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.
Oscar Wilde
#24. I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself do not interest me. The have not got the charm of novelty.
Oscar Wilde
#25. The best way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.
Oscar Wilde
#26. She had marred him for a moment, if he had wounded her for an age.
Oscar Wilde
#27. Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.
Oscar Wilde
#28. Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide and has many marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm that possesses: my life as an artist depends on him.
Oscar Wilde
#29. I think little of pen and ink in revolutions.
Oscar Wilde
#31. I live constantly in the fear of not being misunderstood.
Oscar Wilde
#32. I lost one illusion last night. I thought I had no heart. I find I have, and a heart doesn't suit me, Windermere. Somehow it doesn't go with modern dress. It makes one look old. And it spoils one's career at critical moments.
Oscar Wilde
#33. Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.
Oscar Wilde
#34. Her love was trembling in laughter on her lips.
Oscar Wilde
#35. One should never give a woman anything she can't wear in the evening.
Oscar Wilde
#36. Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you.
Oscar Wilde
#37. Be yourself, because others are already taken.
Oscar Wilde
#38. The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.
Oscar Wilde
#39. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.
Oscar Wilde
#40. I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
Oscar Wilde
#42. The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
Oscar Wilde
#43. A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.
Oscar Wilde
#44. Oh, when I think that I made of a man like you my ideal! the ideal of my life!
There was your mistake. There was your error. The error all women commit. Why can't you women love us, faults and all?
Oscar Wilde
#45. All good looks are a snare. They are a snare that every sensible man would like to be caught in.
Oscar Wilde
#46. I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
Oscar Wilde
#47. An admirable idea! Mr. Worthing, there is just one question I would like to be permitted to put to you. Where is your brother Ernest? We are both engaged to be married to your brother Ernest, so it is a matter of some importance to us to know where your brother Ernest is at present.
Oscar Wilde
#48. The only thing I have to declare is my genius.
Oscar Wilde
#49. I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.
Oscar Wilde
#50. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth.
Oscar Wilde
#53. The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.
Oscar Wilde
#54. I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love.
Oscar Wilde
#55. The proper school to learn art is not life but art
Oscar Wilde
#56. Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such
a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.
Oscar Wilde
#58. It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable.
Oscar Wilde
#59. But the happiness of a married man, my dear Gerald, depends on the people he has not married.
Oscar Wilde
#60. Before I could answer that, I should have to see your soul." "To see
Oscar Wilde
#61. Oh, do not cease at all; I thought the nightingale sang but at night; or if thou needst must cease, then let my lips touch the sweet lips that can such music make.
Oscar Wilde
#62. He did not wring his hands, as do
Those witless men who dare
To try to rear the changeling Hope
In the cave of black Despair.
Oscar Wilde
#63. Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They're the only things we can pay.
Oscar Wilde
#64. That is the mission of art - to make us pause and look at a thing a second time.
Oscar Wilde
#65. Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.
Oscar Wilde
#66. For one moment our lives met, our souls touched.
Oscar Wilde
#67. Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
Oscar Wilde
#68. Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
#69. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Oscar Wilde
#70. I believe that you are really a very good husband but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.
Oscar Wilde
#71. I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
Oscar Wilde
#72. Suddenly I found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me.
Oscar Wilde
#73. One must have some sort of occupation nowadays. If I hadn't my debts I shouldn't have anything to think about.
Oscar Wilde
#74. During the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of torture. His
Oscar Wilde
#75. Alone, and without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
Oscar Wilde
#76. You seem to be displaying signs of triviality.
Oscar Wilde
#77. Bigamy ? It's having one wife too much ...
... Monogamy ? It's the same.
Oscar Wilde
#78. If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
Oscar Wilde
#79. Good havens! I suppose a man may eat his own muffin in his own garden.
Oscar Wilde
#80. I am always late on principle, my principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
Oscar Wilde
#81. There seemed to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.
Oscar Wilde
#82. When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.
Oscar Wilde
#83. Simple pleasures are the last healthy refuge in a complex world.
Oscar Wilde
#84. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Oscar Wilde
#86. A man who takes himself too seriously will find that no one else takes him seriously.
Oscar Wilde
#87. I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who be in jail
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
Oscar Wilde
#88. In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'
Oscar Wilde
#89. The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious ...
Oscar Wilde
#90. You can't possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It's absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.
Oscar Wilde
#91. A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.
Oscar Wilde
#92. Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
Oscar Wilde
#93. Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence.
Oscar Wilde
#94. Intuition is a strange instinct that tells a woman she is right, whether she is or not.
Oscar Wilde
#95. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow. . . .
Oscar Wilde
#96. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.
Oscar Wilde
#97. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.
Oscar Wilde
#98. America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
Oscar Wilde
#99. Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne
Oscar Wilde
#100. Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.
Oscar Wilde
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