Quotes By Oscar Wilde

Date of Birth: October 16, 1854    Date of Death: November 30, 1900

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.  ~ Oscar Wilde


I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.  ~ Oscar Wilde


A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard, and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.  ~ Oscar Wilde


You can never be overdressed or overeducated.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.  ~ Oscar Wilde

To most of us the real life is the life we do not lead.  ~ Oscar Wilde


One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.  ~ Oscar Wilde


To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.   ~ Oscar Wilde


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


A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.  ~ Oscar Wilde


There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.  ~ Oscar Wilde


I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.  ~ Oscar Wilde


All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Life is too important to be taken seriously.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.  ~ Oscar Wilde


The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.  ~ Oscar Wilde


The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.  ~ Oscar Wilde


To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.  ~ Oscar Wilde


With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?   ~ Oscar Wilde


Work is the curse of the drinking classes.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.  ~ Oscar Wilde


No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.  ~ Oscar Wilde


A man's face is his autobiography.  A woman's face is her work of fiction.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Who, being loved, is poor?  ~ Oscar Wilde


Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.  ~ Oscar Wilde


In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.  ~ Oscar Wilde


I can resist everything except temptation.  ~ Oscar Wilde


One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.  ~ Oscar Wilde


It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Hatred is blind, as well as love.  ~ Oscar Wilde


A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist.  It lacks imperfection.  ~ Oscar Wilde


As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.  ~ Oscar Wilde


No good deed goes unpunished.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.  ~ Oscar Wilde


A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Truth is independent of facts always.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.  ~ Oscar Wilde


The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance.  ~ Oscar Wilde


I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.  ~ Oscar Wilde


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


A true friend stabs you in the front.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Women are made to be loved, not understood.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.  ~ Oscar Wilde


It's the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.  ~ Oscar Wilde


The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Bad artists always admire each others work.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.  ~ Oscar Wilde


The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.  ~ Oscar Wilde


If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.  ~ Oscar Wilde


It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.  ~ Oscar Wilde


I am not young enough to know everything.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.  ~ Oscar Wilde


I have nothing to declare except my genius.  ~ Oscar Wilde


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


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


After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relatives.  ~ Oscar Wilde


When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.  ~ Oscar Wilde


I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.  ~ Oscar Wilde


There are times when sorrow seems the only truth.  ~ Oscar Wilde


The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.  ~ Oscar Wilde


A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.  ~ Oscar Wilde


Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.  ~ Oscar Wilde


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


The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.  ~ Oscar Wilde


We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.  ~ Oscar Wilde