Quotes by Oscar Wilde

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.

A flower blossoms for its own joy.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

A true friend stabs you in the front.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Divorces are made in heaven.

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.

True love is just like regular love, but with more truth.

Too much work, and no vacation, Deserves at least a small libation. So hail! my friends, and raise your glasses, Work's the curse of the drinking classes.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.

One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends.

Time is a waste of money.

Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working.

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.

I like men who have a future and women who have a past.

History is merely gossip.

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

True friends stab you in the front.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

I am not young enough to know everything.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Who, being loved, is poor?

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

I can resist everything except temptation.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.

And all men kill the thing they love, By all 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.

My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.

Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer.

One of the chief faults of modern dress is that it is composed of far too many articles of clothing, most of which are the wrong substance.

It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.

Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman.

I like people who are young, bright, happy, careless and original. I do not like them sensible, and I do not like them old.

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is human's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

Disobedience is man's original virtue.

Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone.

The english country gentleman galloping after a fox--the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

It was better to be good-looking than to be good.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you'll get the result.

A man's face is his autobiography. A women's face is her work of fiction.

No matter who broke your heart, or how long it takes to heal, you'll never get through it without your friends.

Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the eyes of man are very different.

The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise.

Dullness is always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent Bestia Trionfans that calls wisdom from its cave.

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the attractiveness of other.

The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself.

Curious thing, plain women are always jealous of their husbands, beautiful women never are!

In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst.

Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One's individuality absolutely leaves one.

Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age.

The essence of art is to produce the modern idea under an antique form.

A kiss may ruin a human life.

Some cause happiness wherever they go. Others whenever they go.

To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope.

Rudderless, we drift athwart a tempest, and when once the storm of youth is past, Without lyre, without lute or chorus, Death the silent pilot comes at last.

And no hand can gather up the fallen withered petals of the rose of youth.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life long romance.

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

We lose our chances, we lose our figures, we even lose our characters; but we must never lose our tempers. That is our duty to our neighbor...but sometimes we mislay it, don't we?

It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produced a false impression.

It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then only at dinner parties.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Hearts live by being wounded.

The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel.

I think it's very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not defined by another person.

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

I don't say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could.

It is better to know and be disappointed, than to not know and always wonder.

Duty is what one expects from others.

We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.

A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.

What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless.

I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.

Progress is the realization of utopia.

If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.

I did not know it was such pain to die; I thought that life had taken all the agonies to itself.

If Dorian wishes it, of course you must stay. Dorian's whims are laws to everybody, except himself.

What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.

Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.

Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.

I am dazed with a dull sense of pain. I had fed on hope, and now anguish, grown hungry, feeds her fill on me as though she had been starved of her proper appetite.