Oscar Wilde Quotes (991 Quotes)

Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

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.

Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.

There seemed to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

Yes Harry I believe that is true. I cannot help telling you things. You have a curious influence over me. If I ever did a crime I would come and confess it to you. You would understand me.

Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?

American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.

I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you. But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.

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

The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.

To be good is to be in harmony with ones self. Discord is to be forces to be in harmony with others.

If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-eduacated.

But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

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

Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important.

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.

What fire does not destroy, it hardens

The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.

Genie währt länger als Schönheit.

I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.

There was a silence. The evening darkened in the room. Noiselessly and with silver feet the shadows crept in from the garden. The colours faded wearily out of things.

Yes, very sensible... People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.

Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old.

Any man can be happy with any woman, so long as he doesn't love her.

I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else.

It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering.

To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.