Oscar Wilde Quotes

My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.

~ Oscar Wilde

Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy…

~ Oscar Wilde

What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than begin talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.

~ Oscar Wilde

She lives in the poetry she cannot write.

~ Oscar Wilde

Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination

~ Oscar Wilde

Life cannot be written, life can only be lived.

~ Oscar Wilde

. . . try as we may we cannot get behind things to the reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in things apart from their appearances.

~ Oscar Wilde

But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.

~ Oscar Wilde

He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.

~ Oscar Wilde

I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love.

~ Oscar Wilde

I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.

~ Oscar Wilde

Indeed, as a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else.

~ Oscar Wilde

Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth.

~ Oscar Wilde

I don't want to earn a living, I want to live.

~ Oscar Wilde

I have forgotten all about my school days. I have a vague impression that they were detestable.

~ Oscar Wilde

There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.

~ Oscar Wilde

There was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance.

~ Oscar Wilde

this woman is a genius in the day time and a beauty at night

~ Oscar Wilde

Never mind what I say. I am always saying what I shouldn't say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.

~ Oscar Wilde

My doctor says I must not have any serious conversation after seven [o'clock]. It makes me talk in my sleep.

~ Oscar Wilde

Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? Do you really think, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not-there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, terrible courage. I had that courage.

~ Oscar Wilde

Do you want to kill his love for you? What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great political career, if you close the doors of public life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success? Women are not meant to judge us but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission. Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew himself? A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A women's life revolves around curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that man's life progresses. Don't make any terrible mistake, Lady Chiltern. A woman who can keep a man's love, and love him in return, has done all the world wants of women, or should want of them.

~ Oscar Wilde

The pure and simple truth is, the truth is never pure and simple.

~ Oscar Wilde

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

~ Oscar Wilde

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.Vice and virtue are the artist’s materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feelings, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectators, and not life, that art really mirrors.

~ Oscar Wilde

He was a man of most subtle and refined intellect. A man of culture, charm, and distinction. One of the most intellectual men I ever met.I prefer a gentlemanly fool any day. There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally I have a great admiration for stupidity. It is a sort of fellow-feeling, I suppose.

~ Oscar Wilde

the people who love only 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 failure. a

~ Oscar Wilde

The drawback of stealing a thing, is that one never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is.

~ Oscar Wilde

Marriage is a matter for common sense.But women who have common sense are so curiously plain, father, aren't they? Of course I only speak from heresay?No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex.

~ Oscar Wilde

Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.

~ Oscar Wilde

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

~ Oscar Wilde

Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly.

~ Oscar Wilde

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

~ Oscar Wilde

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

~ Oscar Wilde

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.

~ Oscar Wilde

Niagara ... is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there.

~ Oscar Wilde

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

~ Oscar Wilde

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

~ Oscar Wilde

There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

~ Oscar Wilde

So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets...

~ Oscar Wilde