Oscar Wilde Quotes

If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.

~ Oscar Wilde

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

~ Oscar Wilde

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

~ Oscar Wilde

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.

~ Oscar Wilde

Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.

~ Oscar Wilde

I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.

~ Oscar Wilde

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.

~ Oscar Wilde

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

~ Oscar Wilde

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

~ Oscar Wilde

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

~ Oscar Wilde

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

~ Oscar Wilde

When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.

~ Oscar Wilde

What a silly thing love is!' said the student as he walked away. 'It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to philosophy and study metaphysics.' So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read.

~ Oscar Wilde

LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.

~ Oscar Wilde

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

~ Oscar Wilde

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

~ Oscar Wilde

We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

~ 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

Even things that are true can be proved.

~ Oscar Wilde

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.

~ Oscar Wilde

Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not.

~ Oscar Wilde

The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.

~ Oscar Wilde

Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig.

~ Oscar Wilde

Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.

~ Oscar Wilde

Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also.

~ Oscar Wilde

Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.

~ Oscar Wilde

Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is.

~ Oscar Wilde

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

~ Oscar Wilde

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

~ Oscar Wilde

But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

~ Oscar Wilde

With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.

~ Oscar Wilde

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

~ Oscar Wilde

Die Welt ist von Narren geschaffen, damit Weise in ihr Leben.

~ Oscar Wilde

A flower blossoms for its own joy.

~ Oscar Wilde

Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.

~ Oscar Wilde

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.

~ Oscar Wilde

The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.

~ Oscar Wilde

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals.

~ Oscar Wilde

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

~ Oscar Wilde

She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

~ Oscar Wilde