Oscar Wilde Quotes (991 Quotes)


    It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But... it is better to be good than to be ugly.

    Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

    A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.

    To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist -- the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar.

    The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.


    Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.

    He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

    Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

    There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate --- not to the artist but to the public. . . .

    Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

    What is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.

    I played with an idea, and grew willful tossed it into the air transformed it let it escaped and recaptured it made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox.

    There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

    It's either the wallpaper or me. One of us has to go. These were his dying words.

    The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.

    The only way a woman can ever reform her husband is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

    The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one's own perfection, to make one's every dream a reality.

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

    Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attraction of others.

    One can give a really unbiased opinion only about things that do not interest one

    Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

    Starvation, not sin, is the parent of modern crime

    There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.

    We Irish are too poetical to be poets we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.


    We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

    I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

    One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

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

    Where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding. It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiased opinion. . .

    People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.

    And yet, and yet, These Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows it I am with them, in some ways.

    What a fuss people make about fidelity Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not old men want to be faithless, and cannot that is all one can say.

    Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

    Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.


    Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

    I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

    Youth There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile.

    By persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful.

    Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

    Philanthropy seems to me to have become simply the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures

    Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.

    Crying is the refuge of plain women, but the ruin of pretty ones.

    A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

    The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.

    Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.

    Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art.

    Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

    There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.


    Related Authors


    William Shakespeare - George Bernard Shaw - Richard Steele - Lady Gregory - Jean Racine - Henry Taylor - Hannah Cowley - George S. Kaufman - Anton Chekhov - Alexandre Dumas


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