Famous Oscar Wilde Quotes

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN

“I can resist anything except temptation.”

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

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

“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.”

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

AN IDEAL HUSBAND

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”

“It takes a great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.”

“The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself.”

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope."

”There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

"For there is one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about"

"Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys any harmony of the face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!"

"Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know!"

"I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible"

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul"

"Sin is the only real-colour element left in modern life"

“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”

“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 give to their mistakes.”

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

"To define is to limit."

“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.”

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”

“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.”

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

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”

“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.”

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

“Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”

THE CRITIC AS ARTIST

“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.”

“A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”

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

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

De Profundis

"Whatever realised is right."

“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.”

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. 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.”

“I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.”

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

“Yet each man kills the thing he loves..."

"And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew as well as I
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die" -Part III, Stanza 37

OTHER

“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.”

- "The Canterville Ghost"

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

- The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”

- Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.“

- “The Nightingale and the Rose“

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”

- “The Soul of Man Under Socialism“

“The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.”