Oscar Wilde Quotes

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.

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.

I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.

Don't feed the trolls; nothing fuels them so much.

Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.

All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns.

sorrow...is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it

The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.

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

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

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

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

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

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

History is a lie commonly agreed upon.

Don't give a woman advice; one should never give a woman anything she can't wear in the evening.

The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.

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

Oh, he occasionally takes an alcoholiday.

I must remember that a good friend is a new world.

Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things.

One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one's hearers.

Rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians.

Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.

Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

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

He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.

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

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

The best people to work for are me, myself and I.

You can't possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It's absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.

Now and then it is a joy to have one's table red with wine and roses.

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.

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.

Civilization is not by means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The final mystery is oneself.

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.