Oscar Wilde Quotes

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

The curves of your lips rewrite history.

To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.

Thinking is wonderful, but the experience is even more wonderful.

When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.

The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.

What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life

Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties.

Nothing worth knowing can be taught.

You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing.

One should always be in love.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.

The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.

Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.

Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.

I drink to separate my body from my soul.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard Some do it with a bitter look Some with a flattering word The coward does it with a kiss The brave man with a sword

A true gentleman is one who is never intentionally rude.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart

One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

To live in this world is a rare thing; most people just exist.

To give and not expect return, that is what lies at the heart of love.

The only thing I cannot resist is temptation.

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.

Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.

Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success.

When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.

One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

He has no enemies, but he is intensely disliked by his friends.

The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.

He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.

It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.