Oscar Wilde Quotes on Man (87 Quotes)


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

    To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

    Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.


    The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.


    The vilest deeds like poison-weeds Bloom well in prison-air It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate And the warder is Despair.

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

    I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.

    Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

    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.

    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.

    Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

    The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.

    I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.... The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art I altered the minds of men and the colour of things there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder.... I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

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

    How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

    Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

    A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

    It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. . . . The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

    Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.

    LORD ILLINGWORTH. The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. MRS ALLONBY. It ends with Revelations.

    The fact is, you have fallen lately, Cecily, into a bad habit of thinking for yourself. You should give it up. It is not quite womanly. . . . Men don't like it.

    What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

    Talk to a woman as if you loved her, and to a man as if he bored you.

    I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.

    Men can be analyzed, women... merely adored.

    The world has been made by fools that men should live in it

    Men become old, but they never become good.

    On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.

    When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also

    Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.

    There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.

    To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.

    A sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.

    If they have not opened the eyes of the blind, they have at least given great encouragement to the short-sighted, and while their leaders may have all the inexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise to be ever sensible.

    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.

    Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.


    More Oscar Wilde Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Life - Art - World - Woman - People - Pleasure - Youth - Beauty - Love - Age - Money & Wealth - Passion - Soul - Facts - Society & Civilization - Work & Career - Sin - Mind - View All Oscar Wilde Quotations

    More Oscar Wilde Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - The Importance of Being Earnest
    - The Picture of Dorian Gray

    Related Authors


    Tennessee Williams - Oscar Wilde - Richard Steele - Philippe Quinault - Lady Gregory - Henry Porter - George S. Kaufman - George Colman - Anton Chekhov - Alexandre Dumas


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