Oscar Wilde Quotes

Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.

Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

And to the little Squirrel who lived in the fir-tree, and was lonely, he said, 'Where is my mother?' And the Squirrel answered, 'Thou hast slain mine. Dost thou seek to slay thine also?

As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.

You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person!

Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian...I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does. I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.

Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.

The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.

Ah! Happy they whose hearts can breakAnd peace of pardon win!How else may man make straight his pathAnd cleanse his soul from sin?How else but through a broken heartMay the Lord Christ enter in?

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.

You are perfectly right in making some slight alteration. Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.

loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.

Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is asacrament that should be taken kneeling.

If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.

The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

Dear little Swallow, ’ said the Prince, ‘you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery.

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, 'You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.

But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.

If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.

The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder.

What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts.

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.

you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity.

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

It is very difficult sometimes to keep awake, especially at church, but there is no difficulty at all about sleeping.

Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.

You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent

It is very wrong to kill any one[.]""Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

JACKYou're quite perfect, Miss Fairfax.GWENDOLENOh! I hope I am not that. It would leave no room for developments, and I intend to develop in many directions.

Ugh!' snarled the Wolf, as he limped through the brushwood with his tail between his legs, 'this is perfectly monstrous weather. Why doesn't the Government look to it?

I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

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

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.

Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction.

What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours.

You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.

The aim of life is self-development

I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.