Famous Oscar Wilde Quotations

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"I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world."
by Oscar Wilde
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
by Oscar Wilde
"Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement."
by Oscar Wilde
"One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry."
by Oscar Wilde
"One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation."
by Oscar Wilde
"One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing."
by Oscar Wilde
"Nothing is so aggravating than calmness."
by Oscar Wilde
"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
by Oscar Wilde
"No man is rich enough to buy back his past."
by Oscar Wilde
"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
by Oscar Wilde
"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information."
by Oscar Wilde
"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."
by Oscar Wilde
"I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly."
by Oscar Wilde
"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."
by Oscar Wilde
"What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
by Oscar Wilde
"We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow."
by Oscar Wilde
"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards."
by Oscar Wilde
"Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess."
by Oscar Wilde
"Illusion is the first of all pleasures."
by Oscar Wilde
"The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray."
by Oscar Wilde
"Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both."
by Oscar Wilde
"Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected."
by Oscar Wilde
"People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity."
by Oscar Wilde
"There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else."
by Oscar Wilde
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
by Oscar Wilde
"Biography lends to death a new terror."
by Oscar Wilde
"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."
by Oscar Wilde
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
by Oscar Wilde
"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
by Oscar Wilde
"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius."
by Oscar Wilde
"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up."
by Oscar Wilde
"A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her."
by Oscar Wilde
"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
by Oscar Wilde
"The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
by Oscar Wilde
"The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic."
by Oscar Wilde
"The best way to make children good is to make them happy."
by Oscar Wilde
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."
by Oscar Wilde
"The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life."
by Oscar Wilde
"The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it."
by Oscar Wilde
"The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast."
by Oscar Wilde
"The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them."
by Oscar Wilde
"There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad."
by Oscar Wilde
"They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins."
by Oscar Wilde
"Those whom the gods love grow young."
by Oscar Wilde
"Time is waste of money."
by Oscar Wilde
"Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night."
by Oscar Wilde
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
by Oscar Wilde
"We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities."
by Oscar Wilde
"Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attraction of others."
by Oscar Wilde
"While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first is personality, which no one should copy; the second is perfection, which all should aim at."
by Oscar Wilde
"Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat."
by Oscar Wilde
"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
by Oscar Wilde
"As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied."
by Oscar Wilde
"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."
by Oscar Wilde
"Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life."
by Oscar Wilde
"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
by Oscar Wilde
"I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability."
by Oscar Wilde
"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."
by Oscar Wilde
"In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience."
by Oscar Wilde
"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."
by Oscar Wilde
"It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly."
by Oscar Wilde
"In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one."
by Oscar Wilde
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
by Oscar Wilde
"Misfortunes one can endure -- they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults -- Ah! there is the sting of life."
by Oscar Wilde
"No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism."
by Oscar Wilde
"One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be."
by Oscar Wilde
"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
by Oscar Wilde
"Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow."
by Oscar Wilde
"Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others."
by Oscar Wilde
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
by Oscar Wilde
"Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed."
by Oscar Wilde
"One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead."
by Oscar Wilde
"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike."
by Oscar Wilde
"Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals."
by Oscar Wilde
"It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone."
by Oscar Wilde
"I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability."
by Oscar Wilde
"I love acting. It is so much more real than life."
by Oscar Wilde
"If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life."
by Oscar Wilde
"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect."
by Oscar Wilde
"Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching."
by Oscar Wilde
"By persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful."
by Oscar Wilde
"Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative."
by Oscar Wilde
"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
by Oscar Wilde
"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
by Oscar Wilde
"A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."
by Oscar Wilde
"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."
by Oscar Wilde
"All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life."
by Oscar Wilde
"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."
by Oscar Wilde
"All art is quite useless."
by Oscar Wilde
"Alas, I am dying beyond my means."
by Oscar Wilde
"I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing."
by Oscar Fingall O---@---Flahertie Wills Wilde
"When good Americans die they go to Paris."
by Oscar Fingall O---@---Flahertie Wills Wilde
"The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything."
by Oscar Fingall O---@---Flahertie Wills Wilde
"Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead."
by Oscar Fingall O---@---Flahertie Wills Wilde
"A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies."
by Oscar Fingall O---@---Flahertie Wills Wilde
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
by Oscar Fingall O---@---Flahertie Wills Wilde
"I am not young enough to know everything."
by Oscar Fingall O---@---Flahertie Wills Wilde
"Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends."
by Oscar Fingall O---@---Flahertie Wills Wilde
"The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you."
by Oscar Wilde
"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
by Oscar Wilde


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