Oscar Wilde

Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.

— Oscar Wilde

Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.

— Oscar Wilde

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

— Oscar Wilde

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.

— Oscar Wilde

Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

— Oscar Wilde

No, Ernest, don't talk about action. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

— Oscar Wilde

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

— Oscar Wilde

I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.

— Oscar Wilde

Ambition is the last refuge of failure.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.

— Oscar Wilde

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.

— Oscar Wilde

People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.

— Oscar Wilde

The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last.

— Oscar Wilde

He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone.

— Oscar Wilde

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.

— Oscar Wilde

You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.

— Oscar Wilde

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

— Oscar Wilde

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

— Oscar Wilde

No great artist ever sees things as they really are, if he did he would cease to be an artist.

— Oscar Wilde

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

— Oscar Wilde

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

— Oscar Wilde

All art is quite useless.

— Oscar Wilde

Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.

— Oscar Wilde

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

— Oscar Wilde

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

— Oscar Wilde

I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.

— Oscar Wilde

Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.

— Oscar Wilde

By persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful.

— Oscar Wilde

It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.

— Oscar Wilde

Beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.

— Oscar Wilde

I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.

— Oscar Wilde

As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.

— Oscar Wilde

The old believe everything; the middle aged suspect everything, and the young know everything.

— Oscar Wilde

It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

— Oscar Wilde

Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.

— Oscar Wilde

There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

— Oscar Wilde

The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

— Oscar Wilde

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

— Oscar Wilde

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

— Oscar Wilde

It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties.

— Oscar Wilde

The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

— Oscar Wilde

Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.

— Oscar Wilde

It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.

— Oscar Wilde

It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.

— Oscar Wilde

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

— Oscar Wilde

All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

— Oscar Wilde

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

— Oscar Wilde

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

— Oscar Wilde

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.

— Oscar Wilde

Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.

— Oscar Wilde

Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.

— Oscar Wilde

In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.

— Oscar Wilde

The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.

— Oscar Wilde

He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.

— Oscar Wilde

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.

— Oscar Wilde

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

Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the two sexes.

— Oscar Wilde

It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

— Oscar Wilde

A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.

— Oscar Wilde

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

— Oscar Wilde

Who is that man over there? I don't know him. What is he doing? Is he a conspirator? Have you searched him? Give him till tomorrow to confess, then hang him! -- hang him!

— Oscar Wilde

The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

— Oscar Wilde

Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.

— Oscar Wilde

Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.

— Oscar Wilde

To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist -- the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar.

— Oscar Wilde

Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.

— Oscar Wilde

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

— Oscar Wilde

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

— Oscar Wilde

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

— Oscar Wilde

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

— Oscar Wilde

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

— Oscar Wilde

One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything except a good reputation.

— Oscar Wilde

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

— Oscar Wilde

For he who lives more lives than one: More deaths than one must die.

— Oscar Wilde

I am dying beyond my means.

— Oscar Wilde

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

— Oscar Wilde

Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night.

— Oscar Wilde

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.

— Oscar Wilde

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.

— Oscar Wilde

Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

— Oscar Wilde

Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.

— Oscar Wilde

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

— Oscar Wilde

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

— Oscar Wilde

She is absolutely inadmissible into society. Many a woman has a past, but I am told that she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit.

— Oscar Wilde

It is he who has broken the bond of marriage -- not I. I only break its bondage.

— Oscar Wilde

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

— Oscar Wilde

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

— Oscar Wilde