Oscar Wilde was an Irish essayist, novelist, playwright and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.
We review 150 of Irish author Oscar Wilde most memorable quotes.
The Best Oscar Wilde Quotes
Here's 150 of his very best quotes:
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of
nothing.
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
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| Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. ― Oscar Wilde |
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally
dislike.
To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose
both looks like carelessness.
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.
Everyone may not be good, but there's always something good in everyone. Never judge anyone shortly because every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
It's beauty that captures your attention. personality which captures your heart.
People may fail many times, but they become failures only when they begin to blame someone else.
Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won't expect it back.
Two men look out a window. One sees mud, the other sees the stars.
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
True contentment is not having everything, but in being satisfied with everything you have.
True friends stab you in the front.
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who
know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without
civilization in between.
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| Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much. ― Oscar Wilde |
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far
the best ending for one.
The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have
somebody find out.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one
wants, and the other is getting it.
The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no
principles better than anything else in the world.
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own
shame.
A good friend will always stab you in the front.
I am not young enough to know everything.
Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
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| Women are made to be loved, not understood. ―Oscar Wilde |
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does,
and that is his.
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either
charming or tedious.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to
live as one wishes to live.
Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women,
because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon
you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.
How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating
her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.
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.
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written, or badly written. That is all.
One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who
would tell one that would tell one anything.
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that
no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest,
that gives us absolution.
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| We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. ― Oscar Wilde |
If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being
always immensely over-educated.
Only the shallow know themselves.
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it
is not.
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am
saying.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had
the courage to commit.
Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and
he will tell you the truth.
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 only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.
Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
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.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every
six months.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves. By each let this be heard, Some do
it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it
with a kiss, The brave man with a sword.
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only
person who is never serious.
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| Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go. ― Oscar Wilde |
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take
exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is
worth knowing.
Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity.
We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like
is to be a man’s last romance.
I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make
modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is
delightful if only one hides it.
It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory,
and still to love it.
I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.
This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.
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.
The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
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.
Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
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| To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. ― Oscar Wilde |
Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
Who, being loved, is poor?
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
Some things are more precious because they don't last long.
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good
characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with
company.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist,
not of the sitter.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life
imitates art far more than art imitates life.
I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is
never of any use to oneself.
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that
others might pick them up.
Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties.
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves
- which is the same thing nowadays.
The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts
are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.
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.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in
reading it at all.
You can never be overdressed or overeducated.
I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.
Hearts are made to be broken.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something
sensational to read in the train.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to
time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge
them; sometimes they forgive them.
I have nothing to declare except my genius.
No good deed goes unpunished.
I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
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.
If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.
I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to
make an ass of yourself.
Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the
refuge of people who have nothing to do.
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the
noblest motives.
You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect
pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can
one want?
I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after.
I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.
I don’t say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked
and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be
when you can't help it.
Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
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.
With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly
happy?
I can resist anything except temptation.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that
is not being talked about.
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.
Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a
very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.
The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the
senses but the soul.
The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of
your lips rewrite history.
There is no sin except stupidity.
Life is too short to learn German.
Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more
things forbidden to them.
They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that
nightmares are dreams, too.
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is
absolutely fatal.
One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are
disappointed.
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
