Oscar Wilde quotes
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900): Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete. The library holds 502 quotes by Oscar Wilde, drawn from Miscellaneous Aphorisms, Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Importance of Being Earnest. The 60 below are the most quoted; search the library in the maker for the rest.
Often about: humour, time, art, faith, love, change
The best-known Oscar Wilde quotes
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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act III -
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
The Importance of Being Earnest, Act II -
Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.
Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act III -
I can resist everything except temptation.
Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act I -
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I -
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world’s tongue.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Life holds the mirror up to art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
What on earth should we men do going about with purity and innocence? A carefully thought-out buttonhole is much more effective.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Twisted minds are as natural to some people as twisted bodies.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Modern memoirs are generally written by people who have entirely lost their memories and have never done anything worth recording.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
A high moral tone can hardly be said to conduce very much to either one’s health or one’s happiness.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
People who mean well always do badly. They are like the ladies who wear clothes that don’t fit them in order to show their piety. Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Never speak disrespectfully of society. Only people who can’t get into it do that.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
What is the difference between literature and journalism? Journalism is unreadable and literature is unread.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Cynicism is merely the art of seeing things as they are instead of as they ought to be.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the verities become acrobats we can judge them.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
One can always know at once whether a man has home claims upon his life or not. I have noticed a very, very sad expression in the eyes of so many married men.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of life and of that practical organisation of life that we call society.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Our husbands never appreciate anything in us. We have to go to others for that.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
As for believing things, I can believe anything provided that it is quite incredible.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
A virtue is like a city set upon a hill—it cannot be hid. We can conceal our vices if we care to—for a time at least—but a virtue will out.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
It’s the old, old story. Love—well, not at first sight—but love at the end of the season, which is so much more satisfactory.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
In the common world of fact the wicked are not punished nor the good rewarded. Success is given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to individualism.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
The basis of every scandal is an absolute immoral certainty.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Few people have sufficient strength to resist the preposterous claims of orthodoxy.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Hopper is one of nature’s gentlemen—the worst type of gentleman I know.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Women give to men the very gold of their lives. Possibly; but they invariably want it back in such very small change.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
The aim of life is self-development. To realise one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
To get into the best society nowadays one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people—that is all.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Costume is a growth, an evolution, and a most important, perhaps the most important, sign of the manners, customs, and mode of life of each century.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Of Shakespeare it may be said that he was the first to see the dramatic value of doublets and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilised society.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally, I have a great admiration for stupidity. It is a sort of fellow-feeling, I suppose.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is, of course, obvious. Anybody can make history, only a great man can write it.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Don’t run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary charm in them—sometimes.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
An eternal smile is much more wearisome than a perpetual frown. The one sweeps away all possibilities, the other suggests a thousand.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Society often forgives the criminal, it never forgives the dreamer.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
I never knew what terror was before; I know it now. It is as if a hand of ice were laid upon one’s heart. It is as if one’s heart were beating itself to death in some empty hollow.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
The state is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
When art is more varied nature will, no doubt, be more varied also.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply on what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failure.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have a fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar it will cease to be popular.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms
Where these quotes come from
- Miscellaneous Aphorisms (497 quotes)
- Lady Windermere’s Fan (3 quotes)
- The Importance of Being Earnest (2 quotes)
Every quote comes from a public-domain edition. How the library was made .