Oscar Wilde Quotes

The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives.

~ Oscar Wilde

One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends.

~ Oscar Wilde

My gods dwell in temples made with hands.

~ Oscar Wilde

I quite agree with Dr. Nordau's assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.

~ Oscar Wilde

And Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.

~ Oscar Wilde

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

~ Oscar Wilde

Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue.

~ Oscar Wilde

His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.

~ Oscar Wilde

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

~ Oscar Wilde

People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.

~ Oscar Wilde

The moon in her chariot of pearl

~ Oscar Wilde

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

~ Oscar Wilde

I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.

~ Oscar Wilde

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people.And falsehoods the truths of other people.Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

~ Oscar Wilde

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims....

~ Oscar Wilde

It is the duty of every father... to write fairy tales for his children.

~ Oscar Wilde

Those whom the gods love grow young.

~ Oscar Wilde

Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

~ Oscar Wilde

Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?

~ Oscar Wilde

Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.

~ Oscar Wilde

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

~ Oscar Wilde

Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day.

~ Oscar Wilde

Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid.Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.

~ Oscar Wilde

It was winter, and a night of bitter cold. The snow lay thick upon the ground, and upon the branches of the trees: the frost kept snapping the little twigs on either side of them, as they passed: and when they came to the Mountain-Torrent she was hanging motionless in air, for the Ice-King had kissed her.

~ Oscar Wilde

Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.

~ Oscar Wilde

The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.

~ Oscar Wilde

How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.

~ Oscar Wilde

It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world

~ Oscar Wilde

She...can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it.

~ Oscar Wilde

I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.

~ Oscar Wilde

I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.

~ Oscar Wilde

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

~ Oscar Wilde

Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.

~ Oscar Wilde

A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacrifice to me, a useless sacrifice.

~ Oscar Wilde

I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought:

~ Oscar Wilde

You told me you had destroyed it.I was wrong. It has destroyed me.

~ Oscar Wilde

because to influence a person is to give one's own soul.

~ Oscar Wilde

There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.

~ Oscar Wilde

What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! exclaimed Lord Henry. A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

~ Oscar Wilde

He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.

~ Oscar Wilde