Oscar Wilde Quotes

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.

It was always once springtime in my heart.

From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power.

Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity?

You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.

It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known

So overjoyed were they at their deliverance that they laughed aloud, and the Earth seemed to them like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold.

I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows.

The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice.

Outside the family circle, papa, I'm glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man.

We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces

I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.

Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read

I don't like compliments and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.

All I want now is to look at life.

And, certainly to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.

You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty.

Utterly, irrevocably, lost

It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it

How pale the Princess is! Never have I seen her so pale. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver.

All I want to do now is look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.

I give the truths of to-morrow.""I prefer the mistakes of today.

That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.

Are ALL men bad?Oh, all of them, my dear, all of them, without any exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good..

If it was my business, I wouldn't talk about it. It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbroker's do that, and then merely at dinner parties.

The one charm about the past is that it is the past.

MISS PRISMMemory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.

I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them.

Silently we went round and round, And through each hollow mindThe memory of dreadful thingsRushed like a dreadful wind, And horror stalked before each man, And terror crept behind.

The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.

Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices.

My dear fellow, it isn't easy to be anything nowadays. There's such a lot of beastly competition about.

To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth

Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?

Failure is only the name that we give to our mistakes."-Oscar Wilde

But somehow, I feel sure that if I lived in the country for six months, I should become so unsophisticated that no one would take the slightest notice of me.

I am the prince of procrastination. It is my besetting sin. I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after

Those who pay their bills on time are soon forgotten. It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.

Lord Henry smiled. "He gives you good advice, I suppose. People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.

You are not listening to a word I am saying . . . and I am making the most delightful plans for your future.

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.

They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.

You don't seem to realise, that in married life three is company and two is none.

It is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.

Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves?