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 | 30,125 visits |
Quotations
| • | Men always want to be a woman’s first love. What women like is to be a man’s last romance. 25 |
| • | Experience is merely the name men give to their mistakes. 21 |
| • | Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. 20 |
| • | Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much. 19 |
| • | True friends stab you in the front. 19 |
| • | Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood. 17 |
| • | Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. 14 |
| • | One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards. 14 |
| • | One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry. 13 |
| • | There is no sin except stupidity. 12 |
| • | Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. 11 |
| • | Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. 11 |
| • | The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. 11 |
| • | Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. 11 |
| • | I can resist anything except temptation. 10 |
| • | It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. 10 |
| • | I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability. 9 |
| • | In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. 9 |
| • | Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed. 9 |
| • | No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. 9 |
| • | To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. 9 |
| • | Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them. 9 |
| • | A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. 8 |
| • | Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. 8 |
| • | The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast. 8 |
| • | The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork. 8 |
| • | 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. 8 |
| • | 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. 8 |
| • | I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying. 7 |
| • | If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life. 7 |
| • | Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary. 7 |
| • | The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. 7 |
| • | Work is the curse of the drinking classes. 7 |
| • | Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself. 7 |
| • | All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his. 6 |
| • | Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken. 6 |
| • | Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. 6 |
| • | I like men who have a future and women who have a past. 6 |
| • | Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life. 6 |
| • | Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. 6 |
| • | The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. 6 |
| • | The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. 6 |
| • | The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. 6 |
| • | There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. 6 |
| • | A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. 6 |
| • | Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist. 6 |
| • | Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. 6 |
| • | Everything that is true is inappropriate. 6 |
| • | Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman. 6 |
| • | A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally. 5 |
| • | All art is immoral. 5 |
| • | All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. 5 |
| • | An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him. (on George Bernard Shaw) 5 |
| • | Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing. 5 |
| • | Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it. One can survive everything nowadays except that. 5 |
| • | Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography. 5 |
| • | Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one. 5 |
| • | One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything. 5 |
| • | Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence. 5 |
| • | The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. 5 |
| • | With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy? 5 |
| • | A poet can survive everything but a misprint. 4 |
| • | Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. 4 |
| • | I have nothing to declare except my genius. (to Customs Officials in New York, in 1881) 4 |
| • | Only the shallow know themselves. 4 |
| • | 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. 4 |
| • | Psychology is in its infancy, as a science. I hope in the interests of Art, it will always remain so. 4 |
| • | The English country gentleman galloping after a fox: the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. 4 |
| • | The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means. 4 |
| • | The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself. 4 |
| • | The pure and simple Truth is rarely pure, and never simple. 4 |
| • | We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. 4 |
| • | Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable. 4 |
| • | An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. 3 |
| • | Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. 3 |
| • | 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. 3 |
| • | Give me the luxuries and I can dispense with the necessities. 3 |
| • | I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train. 3 |
| • | It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. 3 |
| • | Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about. 3 |
| • | Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike. 3 |
| • | No man is rich enough to buy back his own past. 3 |
| • | One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing. 3 |
| • | Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit. 3 |
| • | Time is a waste of money. 3 |
| • | Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived. 3 |
| • | What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. 3 |
| • | You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit. 3 |
| • | A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her. 2 |
| • | I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible. 2 |
| • | I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works. 2 |
| • | In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. 2 |
| • | My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s. 2 |
| • | One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar. 2 |
| • | There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope. 2 |
| • | There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. 2 |
| • | I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellect. 2 |
| • | This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last. 2 |
Quotes in Verse
| • | For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die. 7 |
Funny Quotes
| • | The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one. 4 |
| • | Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won’t expect it back. 3 |
