Oscar Wilde Quotes

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

~ Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong, we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

~ G.k. Chesterton

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

Oscar Wilde: I wish I had said that. Whistler: You will, Oscar; you will.

~ James Mcneill Whistler

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

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

It is a consolation or a misfortune that the wrong kind of people are too often correct in their prognostications of the future, the far-seeing are also the foolish.

~ Robbie Ross

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, on the 15th October, 1856, so that he is now about twenty-six years of age, but brief as has been his career, it has been full of promise for the future. The son of highly intellectual parents, he has had an exceptional education, has travelled much in wild and remote, through classic lands, and in the course of these journeys has learnt to appreciate the beauties of the old authors, in whose works whilst at college he attained exceptional proficiency. But his naturally enthusiastic temperament teaches him to hope for better in the future than has been achieved in the past, and to see how vast will be the influence of Art and Literature on the coming democracy of Intellect, when education and culture shall have taught men to pride themselves on what they have done, and not alone on the deeds of their ancestors.

~ Walter Hamilton

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

There's this funny thing I've noticed about people. You never really get the story you expect. Ask them about what they have, and they'll tell you about what they want. Ask them to tell you about love, and they'll tell you about heartbreak. Ask them about death, though, and they'll tell you about life.

~ Pascalle Lepas

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

England is seen at its worst when it has to deal with men like Wilde. In Germany Wilde and Byron are appreciated as authors: in England they still go pecking about their love-affairs. Anyone who calls a book ‘immoral’ or 'moral’ should be caned. A book by itself can be neither. It is only a question of the morality or immorality of the reader. But the English approach all questions of vice with such a curious mixture of curiosity and fear that it’s impossible to deal with them.

~ Charles Hamilton Sorley

Du Bois sighed theatrically. “It’s as if Oscar Wilde never died for our sins.

~ Gavin G. Smith

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

Those were my last words. To be listed in some book of quotations, alphabetically after

~ Roberta Pearce

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

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

~ Harold Bloom

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