Oscar Wilde Quotes (991 Quotes)

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

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

There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.

Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not

Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Oh, duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.

Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning.

It requires one to assume such indecent postures.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

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

Some of these people need ten years of therapy -ten sentences of mine do not equal ten years of therapy.

When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.

I can believe anything, provided it is quite incredible.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

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

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.

In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.

Caricature is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius.

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 forgive life, to be at peace.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

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

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

Pardon me, you are not engaged to any one. When you do become engaged to some one, I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself.

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.

America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.

Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them.

The Bostonians take their learning too sadly culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs.

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

If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.

I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.

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

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

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

She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.

As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.

People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.

My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.

I should be like a lion in a cave of savage Daniels.

Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization.

Fashion is the method by which the fantastic becomes for a moment universal.

He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose.