Quotes by
Oscar Wilde |
1854-1900 , Irish writer
Irish poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England, which advocated art for art’s sake, and he was the object of celebrated civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895–97).
He is remembered also for his brilliant epigrams.
| 101 quotes | 32,270 visits |
Quotations
| • | Men always want to be a woman’s first love. What women like is to be a man’s last romance. 27 |
| • | Experience is merely the name men give to their mistakes. 22 |
| • | True friends stab you in the front. 21 |
| • | Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. 21 |
| • | Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much. 20 |
| • | Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood. 19 |
| • | One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards. 15 |
| • | Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. 15 |
| • | One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry. 14 |
| • | There is no sin except stupidity. 13 |
| • | Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. 12 |
| • | The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. 12 |
| • | Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. 12 |
| • | Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. 12 |
| • | Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed. 11 |
| • | It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. 11 |
| • | I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability. 11 |
| • | I can resist anything except temptation. 11 |
| • | Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them. 10 |
| • | To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. 10 |
| • | To be really medieval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes. 10 |
| • | No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. 10 |
| • | In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. 10 |
| • | 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. 9 |
| • | The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork. 9 |
| • | The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast. 9 |
| • | Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. 9 |
| • | A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. 9 |
| • | Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself. 8 |
| • | Work is the curse of the drinking classes. 8 |
| • | The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. 8 |
| • | Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary. 8 |
| • | If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life. 8 |
| • | I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying. 8 |
| • | Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography. 8 |
| • | Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman. 7 |
| • | Everything that is true is inappropriate. 7 |
| • | Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. 7 |
| • | Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist. 7 |
| • | A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. 7 |
| • | There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. 7 |
| • | The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. 7 |
| • | The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. 7 |
| • | The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. 7 |
| • | Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. 7 |
| • | Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life. 7 |
| • | I like men who have a future and women who have a past. 7 |
| • | Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. 7 |
| • | Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken. 7 |
| • | All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his. 7 |
| • | With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy? 6 |
| • | The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. 6 |
| • | Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence. 6 |
| • | One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything. 6 |
| • | Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one. 6 |
| • | Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it. One can survive everything nowadays except that. 6 |
| • | Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing. 6 |
| • | An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him. (on George Bernard Shaw) 6 |
| • | All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. 6 |
| • | All art is immoral. 6 |
| • | A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally. 6 |
| • | Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable. 5 |
| • | What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. 5 |
| • | We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. 5 |
| • | Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived. 5 |
| • | The pure and simple Truth is rarely pure, and never simple. 5 |
| • | The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself. 5 |
| • | The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means. 5 |
| • | The English country gentleman galloping after a fox: the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. 5 |
| • | Psychology is in its infancy, as a science. I hope in the interests of Art, it will always remain so. 5 |
| • | People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately. 5 |
| • | Only the shallow know themselves. 5 |
| • | I have nothing to declare except my genius. (to Customs Officials in New York, in 1881) 5 |
| • | Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. 5 |
| • | A poet can survive everything but a misprint. 5 |
| • | You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit. 4 |
| • | Time is a waste of money. 4 |
| • | Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit. 4 |
| • | One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing. 4 |
| • | No man is rich enough to buy back his own past. 4 |
| • | Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike. 4 |
| • | Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about. 4 |
| • | It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. 4 |
| • | I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train. 4 |
| • | Give me the luxuries and I can dispense with the necessities. 4 |
| • | Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. 4 |
| • | Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. 4 |
| • | An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. 4 |
| • | This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last. 3 |
| • | I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellect. 3 |
| • | There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. 3 |
| • | There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope. 3 |
| • | One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar. 3 |
| • | My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s. 3 |
| • | In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. 3 |
| • | I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works. 3 |
| • | I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible. 3 |
| • | A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her. 3 |
Quotes in Verse
| • | For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die. 9 |
Funny Quotes
| • | The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one. 5 |
| • | Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won’t expect it back. 4 |
