Oscar Wilde Quotes

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854–30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. Here are some best Oscar Wilde quotes.

1. “It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.” — Oscar Wilde

2. “One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.” — Oscar Wilde

3. “A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.” — Oscar Wilde

4. “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” — Oscar Wilde

5. “You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.” — Oscar Wilde

6. “No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.” — Oscar Wilde

7. “Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.” — Oscar Wilde

8. “I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.” — Oscar Wilde

9. “This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.” — Oscar Wilde

10. “If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.” — Oscar Wilde

11. “Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.” — Oscar Wilde

12. “As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.” — Oscar Wilde

13. “Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.” — Oscar Wilde

14. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.” — Oscar Wilde

15. “Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.” — Oscar Wilde

16. “Why was I born with such contemporaries?” — Oscar Wilde

17. “When good Americans die they go to Paris.” — Oscar Wilde

18. “I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.” — Oscar Wilde

19. “Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.” — Oscar Wilde

20. “Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.” — Oscar Wilde

21. “Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.” — Oscar Wilde

22. “Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.” — Oscar Wilde

23. “It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But… it is better to be good than to be ugly.” — Oscar Wilde

24. “Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.” — Oscar Wilde

25. “The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.” — Oscar Wilde

26. “I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.” — Oscar Wilde

27. “In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.” — Oscar Wilde

28. “In married life three is company and two none.” — Oscar Wilde

29. “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” — Oscar Wilde

30. “Always forgive your enemies — nothing annoys them so much.” — Oscar Wilde

31. “I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.” — Oscar Wilde

32. “It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.” — Oscar Wilde

33. “If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.” — Oscar Wilde

34. “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.” — Oscar Wilde

35. “One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.” — Oscar Wilde

36. “Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” — Oscar Wilde

37. “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” — Oscar Wilde

38. “Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.” — Oscar Wilde

39. “In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modeling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.” — Oscar Wilde

40. “Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.” — Oscar Wilde

41. “The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.” — Oscar Wilde

42. “In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.” — Oscar Wilde

43. “Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.” — Oscar Wilde

44. “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.” — Oscar Wilde

45. “Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.” — Oscar Wilde

46. “One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.” — Oscar Wilde

47. “I can resist everything except temptation.” — Oscar Wilde

48. “London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don’t know.” — Oscar Wilde

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

50. “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” — Oscar Wilde

51. “Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.” — Oscar Wilde

52. “There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.” — Oscar Wilde

53. “Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.” — Oscar Wilde

54. “Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.” — Oscar Wilde

55. “Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” — Oscar Wilde

56. “‘The Lady’s World’ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.” — Oscar Wilde

57. “Men always want to be a woman’s first love — women like to be a man’s last romance.” — Oscar Wilde

58. “Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.” — Oscar Wilde

59. “There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose.” — Oscar Wilde

60. “There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating — people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.” — Oscar Wilde

61. “The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.” — Oscar Wilde

62. “The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.” — Oscar Wilde

63. “Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.” — Oscar Wilde

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

65. “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” — Oscar Wilde

66. “An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.” — Oscar Wilde

67. “Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.” — Oscar Wilde

68. “Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.” — Oscar Wilde

69. “Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.” — Oscar Wilde

70. “Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.” — Oscar Wilde

71. “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” — Oscar Wilde

72. “Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.” — Oscar Wilde

73. “It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.” — Oscar Wilde

74. “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” — Oscar Wilde

75. “In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.” — Oscar Wilde

76. “One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.” — Oscar Wilde

77. “The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.” — Oscar Wilde

78. “I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.” — Oscar Wilde

79. “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” — Oscar Wilde

80. “I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.” — Oscar Wilde

81. “In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.” — Oscar Wilde

82. “The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.” — Oscar Wilde

83. “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” — Oscar Wilde

84. “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” — Oscar Wilde

85. “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.” — Oscar Wilde

86. “Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.” — Oscar Wilde

87. “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.” — Oscar Wilde

88. “Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.” — Oscar Wilde

89. “There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.” — Oscar Wilde

90. “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it… I can resist everything but temptation.” — Oscar Wilde

91. “True friends stab you in the front.” — Oscar Wilde

92. “When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.” — Oscar Wilde

93. “The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.” — Oscar Wilde

94. “America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.” — Oscar Wilde

95. “There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.” — Oscar Wilde

96. “There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.” — Oscar Wilde

97. “Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.” — Oscar Wilde

98. “I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.” — Oscar Wilde

99. “The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.” — Oscar Wilde

100. “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” — Oscar Wilde

101. “What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.” — Oscar Wilde

This Post was previously republished on Quotes OF Quote.