Oscar Wilde Quotes

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

Man is many things, but he is not rational.

I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

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

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

Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art

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

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

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

Give children beauty, not the record of bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls, as they call history, or of the latitude and longitude of places nobody cares to visit, as they call geography.

In England ... education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and would probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.

We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, that fire can purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all.

Every American bride is taken there [Niagara Falls], and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.

History is merely gossip

The face of the enemy frightens me only when I see how much it resembles me

There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.

Jack: Actually, I was found. Lady Bracknell: Found? Jack: Uh, yes, I was in... a handbag. Lady Bracknell: A handbag? Jack: Yes, it was... [makes gestures] Jack: an ordinary handbag.

I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.

It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.

It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing

If you want to be witty, say what you think at all times

While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.

There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.

Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the soul alone are shameful.

Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving invitations.

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.

To be premature is to be perfect

It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work when there is no definite object of any kind. To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing.

Youth is the only thing worth having.

The final mystery is oneself... Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul.

I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.

I analyzed you, though you did not adore me.

If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you.

A burnt child loves the fire.

When a man does exactly what a woman expects him to do she doesn't think much of him. One should always do what a woman doesn't expect, just as one should say what she doesn't understand.

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

Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important.

Reported as Oscar Wilde's last words on his death bed... This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go.

The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away.

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

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

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.

Every woman is wrong until she cries.

I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.

It was only in the theatre that I lived

but the bravest man among us is afraid of himself

Misfortunes one can endure--they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah!--there is the sting of life.