Oscar Wilde Quotes

What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.

Genius is born-not paid

A gentleman never offends unintentionally

The true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything.

Nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know good in anything until you have torn the heart out of it by excess.

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her something like a public building.

When asked what he thought of sports, Oscar Wilde replied, "I approve of any activity that requires the wearing of special clothing.

In a temple everything should be serious except the thing that is being worshiped.

Im Krieg machen die Starken die Schwachen zu Sklaven, im Frieden machen die Reichen die Armen zu Sklaven.

The only sin is stupidity.

The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.

I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.

To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life.

I wonder that no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes.

Education is very admirable but let us not forget that anything worth knowing cannot be taught.

Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary charm in them, sometimes.

Where your life leads you, you must go

Everybody in American seems in a rush to catch a train.

My philosophy? I'm always right and you are wrong.

Lord AUGUSTUS:(looking around) Time to educate yourself, I suppose. DUMBY: No, time to forget all I have learned. That is much more important.

I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments.

I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.

It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of the world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

The only thing worse than being misquoted is being sentenced to two years' hard labour for buggery

Is it thy will that I should wax and wane, Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey, And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day?

At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.

If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty

Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.

There is no man who is not, at each moment, what he has been and what he will be.

The job of the critic is to report to us his moods.

Imitation is the homage mediocrity pays to greatness.

Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills.

It is a very dangerous thing to know one’s friends.

The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

Her love was trembling in laughter on her lips.

Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.

As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.

I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.

Women treat us [men] like humanity treats gods – they worship us and keep bothering us to do something.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.