Oscar Wilde Quotes

If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

He hasn't an enemy in the world and none of his friends like him.

So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets...

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied

Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

JACK.I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.ALGERNON.We have.JACK.I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?ALGERNON.The fools? Oh! about the clever people, of course.JACK.What fools!

How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?

If it was my business, I wouldn't talk about it. It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbroker's do that, and then merely at dinner parties.

One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

Irony is wasted on the stupid

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent

Niagara ... is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there.

Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.

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

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.

Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on... The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.

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.

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

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

Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef ... Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees...

Time is a waste of money.

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.

I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.

Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices.

The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.

But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ― curious as it may sound to you ― is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.

They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.

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

Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not.

loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.

Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.

Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig.

All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.

By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.

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.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.

The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.

Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.

Give women the right opportunities and they are capable of everything.

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.

I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.

I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.

She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

The aim of life is self-development

Bad artists always admire each others work.

Men marry because they are tired women because they are curious: both are disappointed.

Deliver me from my disciples!

It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world

When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life. Now that I'm old - I know it is.

The moon in her chariot of pearl

It is not the prisoners who need reformation it is the prisons.

...art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.