Quotes by Oscar Wilde

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.

A flower blossoms for its own joy.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

A true friend stabs you in the front.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Divorces are made in heaven.

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.

True love is just like regular love, but with more truth.

Too much work, and no vacation, Deserves at least a small libation. So hail! my friends, and raise your glasses, Work's the curse of the drinking classes.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.

One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends.

Time is a waste of money.

Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working.

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.

I like men who have a future and women who have a past.

History is merely gossip.

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

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.

True friends stab you in the front.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

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

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

I am not young enough to know everything.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Who, being loved, is poor?

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

I can resist everything except temptation.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.

And all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard Some do it with a bitter look Some with a flattering word The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword.

My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.

Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer.

One of the chief faults of modern dress is that it is composed of far too many articles of clothing, most of which are the wrong substance.

It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.

Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman.

I like people who are young, bright, happy, careless and original. I do not like them sensible, and I do not like them old.

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is human's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

Disobedience is man's original virtue.

Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone.

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

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

It was better to be good-looking than to be good.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you'll get the result.

A man's face is his autobiography. A women's face is her work of fiction.

No matter who broke your heart, or how long it takes to heal, you'll never get through it without your friends.

Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the eyes of man are very different.

The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise.

Dullness is always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent Bestia Trionfans that calls wisdom from its cave.

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the attractiveness of other.

The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself.

Curious thing, plain women are always jealous of their husbands, beautiful women never are!

In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst.

Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One's individuality absolutely leaves one.

Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age.

The essence of art is to produce the modern idea under an antique form.

A kiss may ruin a human life.

Some cause happiness wherever they go. Others whenever they go.

To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope.

Rudderless, we drift athwart a tempest, and when once the storm of youth is past, Without lyre, without lute or chorus, Death the silent pilot comes at last.

And no hand can gather up the fallen withered petals of the rose of youth.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life long romance.

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

We lose our chances, we lose our figures, we even lose our characters; but we must never lose our tempers. That is our duty to our neighbor...but sometimes we mislay it, don't we?

It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produced a false impression.

It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then only at dinner parties.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Hearts live by being wounded.

The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel.

I think it's very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not defined by another person.

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

I don't say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could.

It is better to know and be disappointed, than to not know and always wonder.

Duty is what one expects from others.

We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.

A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.

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

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

Progress is the realization of utopia.

If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.

I did not know it was such pain to die; I thought that life had taken all the agonies to itself.

If Dorian wishes it, of course you must stay. Dorian's whims are laws to everybody, except himself.

What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.

Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.

Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.

I am dazed with a dull sense of pain. I had fed on hope, and now anguish, grown hungry, feeds her fill on me as though she had been starved of her proper appetite.

Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue.

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

None of us men do look what we really are. Demmed good thing, too.

One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.

From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power.

I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.

There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.

The weather still continues charming.

Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic century possible.

What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.

A woman's life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses.

The curves of your lips rewrite history.

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

Some red star had come too close to the earth.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

These sudden conversions do not please me.

Every single work of art is the fulfillment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.

The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.

Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.

I wrote when I did not know life;
now that I know life, I have no more to say.

A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen.

If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.

Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.

The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity.

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

I didn't say I liked it. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

There never has been an artistic age, or an artistic people, since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an exquisite exception.

Shakespeare appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to poetry, but he saw how important costume is as a means of producing certain dramatic effects.

Most people are other people.

It would be unfair to expect other people to be as brilliant as oneself.

It is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologize to one in private for what they have written against one in public.

More women grow old nowadays through the faithfulness of their admirers than through anything else.

I don't play accurately -- any one can play accurately -- but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.

Everything is going to be fine in the end.
If it's not fine it's not the end.

I am going to take up the study of German: indeed this seems to be the proper place for such a study.

You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love.

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

I don't want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice.

There is only good art and mediocre art.

Those who have much are often greedy. Those who have little always share.

Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.

Have nothing in your house that is not useful or beautiful; if such a rule were followed out, you would be astonished at the amount of rubbish you would get rid of.

That is because one realises one's soul only by getting rid of all alien passions, all acquired culture, and all external possessions, be they good or evil.

Progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

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.

All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.

Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving invitations.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.

I know not whether laws be right or whether laws be wrong.

When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.

Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.

Besides, it is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

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

Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.

Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away.

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

I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.

I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.

God and other artists are always a little obscure.

Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world's tongue.

Wisdom comes with winters.

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.

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!

In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.

Immanuel isn't a pun; he Kant be!

He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.

I don't mind plain women being puritans. It is the only excuse they have for being plain.

The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in man That wastes and withers there.

Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.

Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.

The drawback of stealing a thing, is that one never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is.

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.

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.

The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.

I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.

Set in this stormy Northern sea, Queen of these restless fields of tide, England! what shall men say of thee, Before whose feet the worlds divide?

She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.

It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.

You kissed his mouth with mouths of flame: you made the hornèd god your own: You stood behind him on his throne: you called him by his secret name.

For one moment our lives met, our souls touched.

Education is very admirable but let us not forget that anything worth knowing cannot be taught.

Caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius.

People are either charming or tedious.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.

The history of women is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.