“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” ― Oscar Wilde
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.” ― Oscar Wilde
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” ― Oscar Wilde
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” ― Oscar Wilde
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Yes: I am a dreamer. For 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.” ― Oscar Wilde
“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” ― Oscar Wilde
“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A good friend will always stab you in the front.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I am not young enough to know everything.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Hearts are made to be broken.” ― Oscar Wilde
“You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.” ― oscar wilde
“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” ― Oscar Wilde
“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?” ― Oscar Wilde
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” ― Oscar Wilde
“To define is to limit.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” ― 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.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I can resist anything except temptation.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” ― Oscar Wilde
“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.” ― Oscar Wilde
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” ― Oscar Wilde
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” ― Oscar Wilde
“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Who, being loved, is poor?” ― Oscar Wilde
“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” ― Oscar Wilde
“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” ― Oscar Wilde
“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I have nothing to declare except my genius.” ― Oscar Wilde
“What of Art? -It is a malady. --Love? -An Illusion. --Religion? -The fashionable substitute for Belief. --You are a sceptic. -Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith. --What are you? -To define is to limit.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.” ― Oscar Wilde
“No good deed goes unpunished.” ― Oscar Wilde
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Some things are more precious because they don't last long.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each 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” ― Oscar Wilde
“I like men who have a future and women who have a past.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.” ― Oscar Wilde
“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” ― Oscar Wilde
“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Every woman is a rebel.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.” ― Oscar Wilde
“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.” ― 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.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” ― Oscar Wilde
“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?” ― Oscar Wilde
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” ― Oscar Wilde
“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” ― Oscar Wilde
“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.” ― Oscar Wilde
“If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.” ― Oscar Wilde
“There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.” ― Oscar Wilde
“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.” ― Oscar Wilde
“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.” ― Oscar Wilde
“There is no sin except stupidity.” ― Oscar Wilde
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Life is too short to learn German” ― Oscar Wilde
“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.” ― Oscar Wilde
“One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.” ― Oscar Wilde
“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
“Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The basis of optimism is sheer terror.” ― Oscar Wilde
“It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.” ― Oscar Wilde
“They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.” ― Oscar Wilde
“You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?” ― Oscar Wilde
“There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death's house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” ― Oscar Wilde
“She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. ” ― Oscar Wilde
“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)” ― Oscar Wilde
“Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each 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! Some kill their love when they are young, And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of Gold: The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold. Some love too little, some too long, Some sell and others buy; Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.” ― Oscar Wilde
“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.” ― Oscar Wilde
“This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.” ― Oscar Wilde
“One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.” ― Oscar Wilde
“All art is quite useless.” ― Oscar Wilde
“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.” ― Oscar Wilde
“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I don’t say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could” ― Oscar Wilde
“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
“I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Only the shallow know themselves” ― oscar wilde
“Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -- these are the two things that govern us.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I love acting. It is so much more real than life.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight For the greatest tragedy of them all Is never to feel the burning light.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.” ― Oscar Wilde
“You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.” ― Oscar Wilde
“One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.” ― Oscar Wilde
“She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.” ― Oscar Wilde
“We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.” ― Oscar Wilde
“How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless." "Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them." "I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative.” ― Oscar Wilde
“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!” ― Oscar Wilde
“Everything popular is wrong.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Irony is wasted on the stupid” ― Oscar Wilde
“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.” ― Oscar Wilde
“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.” ― Oscar Wilde
“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible....” ― Oscar Wilde
“When the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The one charm about the past is that it is the past.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Punctuality is the thief of time” ― Oscar Wilde
“I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.” ― Oscar Wilde
“She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.” ― Oscar Wilde
“When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.” ― Oscar Wilde
“They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about. ” ― Oscar Wilde
“Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.” ― Oscar Wilde
“One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Work is the curse of the drinking classes.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Some things are too important to be taken seriously.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Hearts Live By Being Wounded” ― Oscar Wilde
“There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women...merely adored.” ― Oscar Wilde
“One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.” ― Oscar Wilde
“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. 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.” ― Oscar Wilde
“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.” ― Oscar Wilde
“In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play... I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. ” ― Oscar Wilde
“It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love” ― Oscar Wilde
“It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” ― Oscar Wilde
“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A flower blossoms for its own joy.” ― 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.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Man is many things, but he is not rational.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.” ― Oscar Wilde
“It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.” ― Oscar Wilde
“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.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.” ― Oscar Wilde
“You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid.” ― Oscar Wilde
“nothing that is worth knowing can be taught” ― Oscar Wilde
“I never change, except in my affections.” ― Oscar Wilde
“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.” ― Oscar Wilde
“My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.” ― Oscar Wilde
“It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world” ― Oscar Wilde
“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.” ― Oscar Wilde
“But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.” ― Oscar Wilde
“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.” ― Oscar Wilde
“You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things...I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas” ― Oscar Wilde
“As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied” ― Oscar Wilde
“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.” ― Oscar Wilde
“There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.” ― Oscar Wilde
“People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive” ― Oscar Wilde
“Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.” ― Oscar Wilde
“People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.” ― Oscar Wilde
“You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.” ― Oscar Wilde
“She...can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious” ― Oscar Wilde
“When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.” ― Oscar Wilde
“How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?” ― Oscar Wilde
“I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A kiss may ruin a human life” ― Oscar Wilde
“I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.” ― Oscar Wilde
“If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.” ― Oscar Wilde
“To be popular one must be a mediocrity.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.” ― Oscar Wilde
“When good Americans die, they go to Paris'. 'Where do bad Americans go?' 'They stay in America'.” ― Oscar Wilde
“What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise” ― Oscar Wilde
“I beg your pardon I didn't recognise you - I've changed a lot.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Each of us has heaven and hell in him...” ― Oscar Wilde
“A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.” ― Oscar Wilde
“If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.” ― Oscar Wilde
“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” ― Oscar Wilde
“One should always be a little improbable.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.” ― Oscar Wilde
“In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.” ― Oscar Wilde
“My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly! You didn't know it then-you know it now.” ― Oscar Wilde
“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I drink to separate my body from my soul.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Each man kills the thing he loves.” ― Oscar Wilde
“For one moment our lives met, our souls touched.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.” ― Oscar Wilde
“When you really want love, you will find it waiting for you.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I am happy in my prison of passion” ― Oscar Wilde
“The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Its a beautiful woman's fate to be the subject of conversation where ever she goes” ― Oscar Wilde
“One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.” ― Oscar Wilde
“If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.” ― Oscar Wilde
“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .” ― Oscar Wilde
“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.” ― Oscar Wilde
“There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one's neighbor that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.” ― Oscar Wilde
“And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.” ― Oscar Wilde
“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence.” ― Oscar Wilde
“America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself.” ― Oscar Wilde
“A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.” ― Oscar Wilde
“I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden." "But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!" "I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing." "That may be, but the muffins are the same!” ― Oscar Wilde
“The error all women commit. Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what use is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon. A man’s love is like that. It is wider, larger, more human than a woman’s. Women think that they are making ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idols merely. You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down, show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses. I was afraid that I might lose your love, as I have lost it now.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.” ― Oscar Wilde
“What fire does not destroy, it hardens” ― Oscar Wilde
“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.” ― Oscar Wilde
“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.” ― Oscar Wilde