Quotes by Oscar Wilde
Bigamy is having one husband or wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Anybody can be good in the country.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
She had more than once changed her husband; indeed, Debrett credits her with three marriages; but as she had never changed her lover, the world had long ago ceased to talk scandal about her.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
History is gossip but scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Fashionable is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
A man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them as much.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Moderation is a fatal thing; nothing succeeds like excess.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Women are never disarmed by compliments; men always are.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Duty is what one expects from others.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
True friends stab you in the front.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
The recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Religion is a fashionable substitute for Belief.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes
Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes