Oscar Wilde Quotes

But neither milk-white rose nor red May bloom in prison air;The shard, the pebble, and the flint, Are what they give us there:For flowers have been known to heal A common man's despair.

~ Oscar Wilde

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

~ Oscar Wilde

An egg is always an adventure, it may be different each time

~ Oscar Wilde

They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.

~ Oscar Wilde

Mary Farquhar, who always flirts with her own husband across the dinner-table. That is not very pleasant. Indeed, it is not even decent . . . and that sort of thing is enormously on the increase. The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public...

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

ALGERNON. I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.JACK. I have no doubt about that, dear Algy. The Divorce Court was specially invented for people whose memories are so curiously constituted.ALGERNON. Oh! there is no use speculating on that subject. Divorces are made in Heaven-...

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

~ Oscar Wilde

Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.

~ Oscar Wilde

And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

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.

~ Oscar Wilde

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

~ Oscar Wilde

Experience is a question of instinct about life.

~ Oscar Wilde

Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.

~ Oscar Wilde

Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

~ Oscar Wilde

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?

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

~ Oscar Wilde

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

~ Oscar Wilde

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

~ Oscar Wilde

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.

~ Oscar Wilde

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!

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.

~ Oscar Wilde

I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.

~ Oscar Wilde

The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty.

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you.

~ Oscar Wilde

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?

~ Oscar Wilde

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.

~ Oscar Wilde

I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

~ Oscar Wilde

You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a a shame in a woman to be an infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or if seen, not regarded.

~ Oscar Wilde

One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable.

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde