Oscar Wilde Quotes (991 Quotes)


    I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

    Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.

    What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race.

    In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.

    His work was that curious mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man to be called a representative British artist.


    For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.

    God's eternal laws are kind-and break the heart of stone.

    One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

    One should not be too severe on English novels they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

    Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.

    The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.

    The story of mankind began in a garden and ended in revelations.

    Its always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.

    It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.

    I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.

    The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.


    Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

    The ugly and the 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.

    The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God.

    Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

    Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

    The mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-

    One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

    Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.

    An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship.


    None of us can stand other people who have the same faults as ourselves.

    There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

    Vulgarity is the conduct of other people, just as falsehoods are the truths of other people.

    It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

    We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon we rage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us.

    Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

    To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

    Beauty is a form of geniusis higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, orspringtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.

    The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

    He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.

    The worst vice of a fanatic is his sincerity.


    She is a peacock in everything but beauty.

    I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

    A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

    Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

    Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.

    It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.

    Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses -- once

    There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

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

    Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.

    The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists of the perfect use of an imperfect medium.


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    Tennessee Williams - Oscar Wilde - Richard Steele - Lady Gregory - John Fletcher - Jean Racine - Henry Porter - George S. Kaufman - George Colman - Alexandre Dumas


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