Oscar Wilde Quotes

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.

~ Oscar Wilde

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

~ Oscar Wilde

Anybody can make history, only a great man can write it.

~ Oscar Wilde

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

~ Oscar Wilde

That is one of the great secrets of life 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

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.

~ Oscar Wilde

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

~ Oscar Wilde

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon.

~ Oscar Wilde

Life has always poppies in her hands.

~ Oscar Wilde

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

~ Oscar Wilde

The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great.

~ Oscar Wilde

The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.

~ Oscar Wilde

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

~ Oscar Wilde

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

~ Oscar Wilde

You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all.

~ Oscar Wilde

JACKThat is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury.ALGERNONThen your wife will. You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none.JACKThat, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.ALGERNONYes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time.

~ Oscar Wilde

Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that?I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.

~ Oscar Wilde

Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worse habits.

~ Oscar Wilde

Lady Windermere: Windermere and I married for love.Duchess of Berwick: Yes, we begin like that. It was only Berwick's brutal and incessant threats of suicide that made me accept him at all, and before the year was out, he was running after all kinds of petticoats, every colour, every shape, every material.

~ Oscar Wilde

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

~ Oscar Wilde

If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

~ Oscar Wilde

tone of colour 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

Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.

~ Oscar Wilde

It was always once springtime in my heart.

~ Oscar Wilde

I am very pleased you like my stories. They are studies in prose, put for Romance's sake into fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find simplicity in a subtle strangeness.

~ Oscar Wilde

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.

~ Oscar Wilde

I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

~ Oscar Wilde

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

~ Oscar Wilde

To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.

~ Oscar Wilde

Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.

~ Oscar Wilde

From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power.

~ Oscar Wilde

We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

~ Oscar Wilde

[Letter to William Ward, 11 July 1878]Dear Boy, Why don’t you write to me? I don’t know what has become of you.As for me I am ruined. The law suit is going against me and I am afraid I will have to pay costs, which means leaving Oxford and doing some horrid work to earn bread. The world is too much for me.However, I have seen Greece and had some golden days of youth. I go back to Oxford immediately for viva voce and then think of rowing up the river to town with Frank Miles. Will you come? YoursOscar

~ Oscar Wilde

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

~ Oscar Wilde

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.

~ Oscar Wilde

Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity?

~ Oscar Wilde

You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.

~ Oscar Wilde

Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. 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

Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.

~ Oscar Wilde

It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.

~ Oscar Wilde