Oscar Wilde Quotes



I love acting. It is so much more real than life.















I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Eduaction is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling I have always cultivated.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist.

We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude.


Education is an admirable thing, but it is well worth remembering from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture, and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

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

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.

The problem with the common person is that he is so unbearably common!

I sometimes think that God, in creating man, overestimated His ability.

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

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

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.



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O bright, bright hair! O mouth like a ripe fruit!
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Love, that was songful, with a broken lute
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