Authors — Quotes

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.