Oscar Wilde quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Oscar Wilde on Wise Famous Quotes.

The only way to get rid of tempation is to yeild to it.

The trouble with women is, that when they grow up, they turn into their mothers. The trouble with men is, that they don't.

And each man kills the thing he loves.

My dear fellow, it isn't easy to be anything nowadays.

When a love comes to an end, weaklings cry, efficient ones instantly find another love, and the wise already have one in reserve.

The world hates Individualism.

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart

Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?

If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.

Oh, I love London Society! It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be.

Dammit Sir, it's your duty to get married. You can't always be living for pleasure!

The best way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.

When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.

Everyone is born a king; some people die in exile

I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.

I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me

Its a beautiful woman's fate to be the subject of conversation where ever she goes

There being some of them who had still quite natural manners, which in a courtier is, I need hardly say, a very grave offence.

And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious

The answers are all out there, we just need to ask the right questions.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

The only thing in the world worse than being Oscar Wilde is not being Oscar Wilde.

I prefer women with a past. They're always so damned amusing to talk to.

Twisted minds are as natural to some people as twisted bodies.

I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions - that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were.

Details are always vulgar

Love - well, not love at first sight, but love at the end of the season, which is so much more satisfactory.

We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.

Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often,

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

Everything popular is wrong.

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.

Nothing worth knowing can be taught.

youth is the one
thing worth having.

The vulgar directness of the question called for a direct answer.

O wandering graves! O restless sleep!
O silence of the sunless day!
O still ravine! O stormy deep!
Give up your prey! Give up your prey!

While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.

Making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

Every woman is a rebel.

I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself,

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk.

Nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know good in anything until you have torn the heart out of it by excess.

Colonel. Can she read and write? Peter. Ay, that she can, sir. Colonel. Then she is a dangerous woman.

Marriage is hardly a thing one can do now and then, except in America.

Reforms in Russia are very tragic, but they always end in a farce.

Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it.

I can believe anything provided it is incredible.

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.

It is better to repent a sin than regret the loss of a pleasure.

Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life

God and other artists are always a little obscure ...

You told me you had destroyed it." "I was wrong. It has destroyed me.

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.

keep love in your heart

Your days are your sonnets.

It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.

The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance.

Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

Life is too short to learn German

All art is quite useless. OSCAR WILDE

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.

To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.

It's either the wallpaper or me. One of us has to go. [These were his dying words.]

Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art.

It is only very ugly or very beautiful women who ever hide their faces .

Out of the black cave of time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin.

My dear fellow, the way you flirt with Gwendolen is perfectly disgraceful. It is almost as disgraceful as the way Gwendolen flirts with you.

Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.

Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.

I can resist anything but the temptation to make a clever witticism.

However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive.

Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.

Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.

Life makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.

Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

A beggar hates his benefactor as much as he hates himself for begging.

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

Strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women ... merely adored.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.

Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is

My wish isn't to mean
everything to everyone
but something to someone.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Tell me, when you are alone with him [ Max Beerbohm ] Sphinx, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?

I don't want to earn a living, I want to live.

There is nothing like race, is there?

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

London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognize them. They look so thoroughly unhappy.

Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.

LORD ILLINGWORTH. As George Harford I had everything I wanted. Now I have merely everything that other people want, which isn't nearly so pleasant.

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.

Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid, but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.