Oscar Wilde Quotes

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.

There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.

Cleverness becomes a public nuisance.

Just to let you know that the buffet car will be closing for stocktaking in five minutes. The next station stop is Chesterfield.

Life is like a box of terrible analogies.

Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.

The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them.

I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

I like my food dry. Not sick, not even dying, dead.

After a good quality dinner one will be able to forgive anybody, still one's own relations.

Millionaire models are rare enough; but model millionaires are rarer still!

The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering.

Come, dear, [Gwendolen rises] we have already missed five, if not six, trains. To miss any more might expose us to comment on the platform.

The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us.

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry.

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.

Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things. That is exactly what things were originally made for.

Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar

LADY BRACKNELL: Do you smoke? JACK: Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. LADY BRACKNELL: I'm glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.

[on his deathbed in a Paris hotel room] Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

Fool, nothing is impossible in Russia but reform.

Liberty is the chosen resort of the artistic shopper.

To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.

The only thing worse than quoting me, is not quoting me

She doth mean the earth to me! By earth, I actually mean dust.

Veni vidi veni iterum! (I came, I saw, I came again!)

All love is true, but not all truth ... is love?

Philosophy is like a normal personal organizer, but it's smaller than a matchbox.

I'm so smart, I read and understand Hegel

The universe is God. I am God so that means I am the universe.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.

Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.

The unread is always better than the unreadable.

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.

LADY STUTFIELD I adore silent men. MRS ALLONBY Oh, Ernest isn't silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don't know. I haven't listened to him for years.

It was you I thought of all the time, I gave to them the love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs.

No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.

Only love can keep anyone alive.

You know I have loved him always. But we are very poor. Who, being loved, is poor? Oh, no one. I hate my riches. They are a burden.

When a golden girl can win Prayer from out the lips of sin, When the barren almond bears, And a little child gives away its tears, Then shall all the house be still And peace come to Canterville.

We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.

ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl...I have ever met since...I met you.

Let me be dressed as I will, yet flies worms and flowers exceed me still.

The only proper intoxication is conversation.

American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

Oh, don't cough, Ernest. When one is dictating one should speak fluently and not cough. Besides, I don't know how to spell a cough.