Inspiring Quotes by Oscar Wilde
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Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

Cleverness becomes a public nuisance.

American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.

Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.

What is beautiful is a joy for all seasons.

To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.

Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.

Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.

Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy.

If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.

Yes, very sensible... People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.

There is a fatality about good resolutions -- that they are always made too late.

Her body swayed, while she danced, as a plant sways in the water.

I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her.

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.

Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.

All great ideas are dangerous.

A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.

Lawyers have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent.

One is not always happy when one is good; but one is always good when one is happy.

All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.

Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.

Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.

The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

I don't at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

A beggar hates his benefactor as much as he hates himself for begging.

The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris.

A burnt child loves the fire.

One should absorb the color of life.

Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never have happened and couldn't possibly have happened.

The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.

Who is that man over there? I don't know him. What is he doing? Is he a conspirator? Have you searched him? Give him till tomorrow to confess, then hang him! -- hang him!

A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime.

It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it.

Life is the art of being well deceived, and to succeed, it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

In love, it is better to know and be disappointed, than to not know and always wonder.

Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.

I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.

Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne.

Life under a good government is rarely dramatic; life under a bad government is always so.

You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.

I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.

The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.

In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.

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.

Yes, I am a thorough republican. No other form of government is so favorable to the growth of art.

I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.

Just to let you know that the buffet car will be closing for stocktaking in five minutes. The next station stop is Chesterfield.

You are not listening to a word I am saying ... and I am making the most delightful plans for your future.

God, bless me with luxury. Necessities I can do without.

People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.

Each of us has heaven and hell in him.

God's eternal laws are kind-and break the heart of stone.

Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them.

Like two doomed ships that pass in storm we had crossed each other's way: but we made no sign, we said no word, we had no word to say.

I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.

Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.

An actor is part illusionist, part artist, part ham.

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.

You should treat the trivial things in life seriously and the serious things in life with a sincere and studied triviality.

One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

The world seemed to me fine because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived.

I like looking at geniuses and listening to beautiful people.

I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.

If we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it.

I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.

Genius lasts longer than beauty.

There is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty.

I played with an idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air; transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox.

Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them.

The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.

Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night.

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.

Alas, I'm dying beyond my means.

I expect I shall have to die beyond my means.

There is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage: a marriage in which there is love, but on one side only.

Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.

Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.
She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.

My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us.

My dear fellow, the truth isn't quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!

Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.

I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.

Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary charm in them, sometimes.

I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.

You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter -- a girl brought up with the utmost care -- to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?

In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself.

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.

Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the center of the city.