Oscar Wilde Quotes

Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.

When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.

If it took Labouchere three columns to prove that I was forgotten, then there is no difference between fame and obscurity.

We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in Art.

We have quite the same ideas. No; I think our ideas are quite different. But he has been most pleasant.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

Though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.

The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.

If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.

Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.

Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.

Bad manners make a journalist.

Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.

There is no such thing as romance in our day, women have become too brilliant; nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman.

The best way to appreciate your job is to, is here to stay.

True love is just like regular love, but with more truth.

The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.

Lean on principles, one day they'll end up giving way.

It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.

If we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it.

I didn't have a life until I went up onstage.

Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.

And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive.

Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Common sense is the enemy of Romance :P:P

Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art.

It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.

Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.

The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.

To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies.

He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.

All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.

The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.

The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.

I didn't say I liked it Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.

The English public always feels perfectly at ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.

Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.

The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious.

My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!

We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes.

When good Americans die, they go to Paris" "Where do bad Americans go?" "They stay in America

I see that any materialism in life coarsens the soul, and that the hunger of the body and the appetites of the flesh desecrate always, and often destroy.