Quotes by Oscar Wilde
Bigamy is having one husband or wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
Wilde, Oscar
Anybody can be good in the country.
Wilde, Oscar
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
Wilde, Oscar
One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.
Wilde, Oscar
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
Wilde, Oscar
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
Wilde, Oscar
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Wilde, Oscar
Fashionable is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
Wilde, Oscar
I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.
Wilde, Oscar
My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.
Wilde, Oscar
No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
Wilde, Oscar
Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
Wilde, Oscar
A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.
Wilde, Oscar
Moderation is a fatal thing; nothing succeeds like excess.
Wilde, Oscar
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
Wilde, Oscar
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
Wilde, Oscar
Women are never disarmed by compliments; men always are.
Wilde, Oscar
Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Wilde, Oscar
The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
Wilde, Oscar
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.
Wilde, Oscar
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Wilde, Oscar
Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.
Wilde, Oscar
True friends stab you in the front.
Wilde, Oscar
Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
Wilde, Oscar
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
Wilde, Oscar
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Wilde, Oscar
Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.
Wilde, Oscar
A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position.
Wilde, Oscar
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.
Wilde, Oscar
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.
Wilde, Oscar
The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Wilde, Oscar
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.
Wilde, Oscar
Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
Wilde, Oscar
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Wilde, Oscar