Oscar Wilde Quotes: 180

• Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

• Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

• I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

  The Happy Prince and Other Stories

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

• We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

  Lady Windermere's Fan

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

• It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

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

• The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

  The Importance of Being Earnest

• Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

• The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

• One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

• To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

• Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

  The Critic as Artist

• No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

• You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

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

• Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.

• Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination.

• There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.

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

• It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

• Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

  Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

• A good friend will always stab you in the front.

• 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 don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.

• Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.

• Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

• You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.

• Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

• I am not young enough to know everything.

• The heart was made to be broken.

• You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

• A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

• Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.

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

• The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

  The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

• I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

• Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

• I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

  The Importance of Being Earnest

• No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

• Who, being loved, is poor?

• A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

• 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 tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

  The Canterville Ghost

• Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

• With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?

• Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

• I can resist anything except temptation.

  Lady Windermere's Fan

• A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

• I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

• If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

• All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.

  The Importance of Being Earnest

• To define is to limit.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

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

  Lady Windermere's Fan

• Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

• Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.

• The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

• Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.

• Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

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

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

• I have nothing to declare except my genius.

• Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

• A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

• I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.

  A Woman of No Importance

• No good deed goes unpunished.

• Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.

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

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

• Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

  Lady Windermere's Fan

• We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

• When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• 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, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.

• To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

• Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

  An Ideal Husband

• I like men who have a future and women who have a past.

• Yet each man kills the thing he lovesBy each let this be heardSome do it with a bitter lookSome with a flattering wordThe coward does it with a kissThe brave man with a sword

  The Ballad Of Reading Gaol

• The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.

• Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

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

• This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

• There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

• Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Nowadays 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.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

  The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and Selected Critical Prose

• Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

• One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.

• I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

  An Ideal Husband

• Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

• There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

• One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.

• Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.

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

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.

• I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!

• You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• True friends stab you in the front.

• In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

• A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

• Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.

• 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.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Hearts Live By Being Wounded

• Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

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

• In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

  The Importance of Being Earnest

• I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.

  The Importance of Being Earnest

• It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love

  An Ideal Husband

• My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.

• You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things...I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas

• nothing that is worth knowing can be taught

• Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.

• It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.

• A kiss may ruin a human life

• To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

  De Profundis

• Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly!You didn't know it then-you know it now.

  Lady Windermere's Fan

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

• Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

• You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

• If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.

• What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise

• But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• I drink to separate my body from my soul.

• Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.

  The Happy Prince and Other Tales

• When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

• We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

• Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

• A flower blossoms for its own joy.

• There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.

• All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

• If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.

• Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is.

• What fire does not destroy, it hardens

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.

  Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

• With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.

• 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.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

  De Profundis

• To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.

  An Ideal Husband

• An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

• It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

• You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

• Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

• Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

• The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.

  The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems

• My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.

• What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.

  A House of Pomegranates

• So with curious eyes and sick surmiseWe watched him day by day,And wondered if each one of usWould end the self-same way,For none can tell to what red HellHis sightless soul may stray.

• Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.

• Even things that are true can be proved.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.

  A Woman of No Importance

• Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

• Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.

• Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

  Reviews

• Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.

  De Profundis

• I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

  De Profundis and Other Writings

• Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.

  The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

• The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.

• Jemanden zu beeinflussen bedeutet, ihm eine fremde Seele zu geben.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.

• So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

• The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.