Oscar Wilde Quotes
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Biography lends to death a new terror.
I am not young enough to know everything.
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
I can resist anything but temptation.
One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.
Genius is born--not paid.
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Crying is the refuge of plain women, but the ruin of pretty ones.
I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
Wisdom comes with winters.
Why was I born with such contemporaries?
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal.
Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.
The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.
To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.
The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
I don't play accurately-any one can play accurately- but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.
Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Only the shallow know themselves.
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.
One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
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 advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.
The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
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.
When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.