Oscar Wilde Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

I am very glad I have travelled. Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one's prejudices.

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

Every woman is wrong until she cries.

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.

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

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

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

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

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

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

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

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 me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders...It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art.

The only way to even approach doing something perfectly is through experience, and experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all.

Most people are other people.

Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.

The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.

The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not its growth and development.

Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.

Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.

Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree.