Oscar Wilde Quotes

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.

You can have your secret as long as I have your heart[.]

I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss.

It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.

There is no Mystery so great as Misery.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.

the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.

Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.

America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself.

I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.

In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.

I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.

She...can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it.

I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.

this woman is a genius in the day time and a beauty at night

Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.

The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability.

Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable

It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.

History is only gossip.

Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.

Let me be surrounded by luxury, I can do without the necessities!

A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen.

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.

Credit is a young man's capital.

One must have some sort of occupation nowadays. If I hadn't my debts I shouldn't have anything to think about.

Women have become so highly educated... that nothing should surprise us nowadays, except happy marriages.

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.

Never buy anything simply because it is expensive.

Life under a good government is rarely dramatic; life under a bad government is always so.

As a rule, I think they are quite impossible. Geniuses talk so much, don't they? Such a bad habit! And they are always thinking about themselves, when I want them to be thinking about me.

The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.

Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.

If we're always guided by other people's thoughts, what's the point in having our own?

The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

The trouble with the lower classes is that they lack the sense of tragedy given to them by the upper classes.

I am happy in my prison of passion

The only thing in the world worse than being Oscar Wilde is not being Oscar Wilde.

Starvation, not sin, is the parent of modern crime.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

The reason we are so pleased to find other people's secrets is that it distracts public attention from our own.

If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.

If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.

By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.

Disobedience is man's original virtue.

The world belongs to the discontented.

To be good is to be in harmony with one's self.