Oscar Wilde Quotes

It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

"I hope your hair curls naturally, does it?" "Yes, darling, with a little help from others."

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

I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.

We live in the age of the overworked and the undereducated.

The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.

Vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people.

How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.

The ability of the theist to misunderstand a thing is directly proportional to the obviousness of the thing.

One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.

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.

God and other artists are always a little obscure.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

If God wished to punish us, all he would need to do would be to answer our prayers.

There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.

There are two ways of disliking poetry, one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned.

It is awfully hard work doing nothing.

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.

Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?

It is what we fear that happens to us.

When good Americans die they go to Paris.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

Reforms in Russia are very tragic, but they always end in a farce.

A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people's toes.

Ah, on what little things does happiness depend.

And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws.

What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.

And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand.

When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.

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

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

What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.

Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

Irony is wasted on the stupid

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

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

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

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.

Time is a waste of money.