Oscar Wilde Quotes

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

~ Oscar Wilde

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

~ Oscar Wilde

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.

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

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. You lost life's secret.

~ Oscar Wilde

My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.

~ Oscar Wilde

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.

~ Oscar Wilde

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.

~ Oscar Wilde

In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?

~ Oscar Wilde

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.

~ Oscar Wilde

It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity, But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.

~ Oscar Wilde

I would sooner lose my best friend than my worst enemy. 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.

~ Oscar Wilde

I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss.

~ Oscar Wilde

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.

~ Oscar Wilde

You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play. I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

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.

~ Oscar Wilde

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.

~ Oscar Wilde

Bronze-limbed and well-knit, like a statue wrought by a Grecian, he stood on the sand with his back to the moon, and out of the foam came white arms that beckoned to him, and out of the waves rose dim forms that did him homage. Before him lay his shadow, which was the body of his Soul, and behind him hung the moon in the honey-coloured air.

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

~ Oscar Wilde

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art.

~ Oscar Wilde

But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ― curious as it may sound to you ― is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.

~ Oscar Wilde

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world... They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet... Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.

~ Oscar Wilde

And yet it was not the mystery, but the comedy of suffering that struck him; its absolute uselessness, its grotesque want of meaning. How incoherent everything seemed! How lacking in all harmony! He was amazed at the discord between the shallow optimism of the day, and the real facts of existence. He was still very young.

~ Oscar Wilde

It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.

~ 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.

~ Oscar Wilde

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

~ Oscar Wilde

The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.

~ Oscar Wilde

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.

~ Oscar Wilde

There is no Mystery so great as Misery.

~ Oscar Wilde

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde