Oscar Wilde

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

— Oscar Wilde

Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.

— Oscar Wilde

Oh, duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.

— Oscar Wilde

The first duty of life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one as yet discovered.

— Oscar Wilde

The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

— Oscar Wilde

Pardon me, you are not engaged to any one. When you do become engaged to some one, I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself.

— Oscar Wilde

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

— Oscar Wilde

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.

— Oscar Wilde

The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion.

— Oscar Wilde

Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

— Oscar Wilde

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

— Oscar Wilde

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.

— Oscar Wilde

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

— Oscar Wilde

An ordinary man away from home giving advice.

— Oscar Wilde

Where there is no extravagance there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.

— Oscar Wilde

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

— Oscar Wilde

Misfortunes one can endure -- they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults -- Ah! there is the sting of life.

— Oscar Wilde

I can believe anything provided it is incredible.

— Oscar Wilde

Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

— Oscar Wilde

I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

— Oscar Wilde

And now, I am dying beyond my means. [Sipping champagne on his deathbed]

— Oscar Wilde

One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

— Oscar Wilde

Woman's first duty in life is to her dressmaker. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.

— Oscar Wilde

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.

— Oscar Wilde

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

— Oscar Wilde

Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment the universal.

— Oscar Wilde

The American father is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher.

— Oscar Wilde

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.

— Oscar Wilde

None of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

— Oscar Wilde

One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

— Oscar Wilde

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

— Oscar Wilde

People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect -- simply a confession of failures.

— Oscar Wilde

What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.

— Oscar Wilde

The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.

— Oscar Wilde

Flowers are as common in the country as people are in London.

— Oscar Wilde

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

— Oscar Wilde

Always forgive your enemies -- nothing annoys them so much.

— Oscar Wilde

An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship.

— Oscar Wilde

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

— Oscar Wilde

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

— Oscar Wilde

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.

— Oscar Wilde

One should always play fair when one has the winning cards.

— Oscar Wilde

The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.

— Oscar Wilde

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

— Oscar Wilde

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.

— Oscar Wilde

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

— Oscar Wilde

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

— Oscar Wilde

A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

— Oscar Wilde

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.

— Oscar Wilde

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

— Oscar Wilde

It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one, behind one's back, that are absolutely and entirely true.

— Oscar Wilde

Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses -- once!

— Oscar Wilde

When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.

— Oscar Wilde

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

— Oscar Wilde

How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?

— Oscar Wilde

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

— Oscar Wilde

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

— Oscar Wilde

Like two doomed ships that pass in storm we had crossed each other's way: but we made no sign, we said no word, we had no word to say.

— Oscar Wilde

I'm sure I don't know half the people who come to my house. Indeed, from all I hear, I shouldn't like to.

— Oscar Wilde

Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.

— Oscar Wilde

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.

— Oscar Wilde

In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself.

— Oscar Wilde

The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.

— Oscar Wilde

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

— Oscar Wilde

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.

— Oscar Wilde

One knows so well the popular idea of health. The English country gentleman galloping after a fox -- the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

— Oscar Wilde

They are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.

— Oscar Wilde

The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.

— Oscar Wilde

The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.

— Oscar Wilde

How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say.

— Oscar Wilde

And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, none knew so well as I: for he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.

— Oscar Wilde

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

— Oscar Wilde

Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone.

— Oscar Wilde

The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.

— Oscar Wilde

The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.

— Oscar Wilde

Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.

— Oscar Wilde

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

— Oscar Wilde

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

— Oscar Wilde

My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.

— Oscar Wilde

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.

— Oscar Wilde

Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.

— Oscar Wilde

Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.

— Oscar Wilde

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.

— Oscar Wilde

The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.

— Oscar Wilde

Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.

— Oscar Wilde

It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.

— Oscar Wilde

With an evening coat and a white tie, anybody, even a stock broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.

— Oscar Wilde

Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.

— Oscar Wilde

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

— Oscar Wilde

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.

— Oscar Wilde

Bad manners make a journalist.

— Oscar Wilde

A kiss may ruin a human life.

— Oscar Wilde

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating --people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

— Oscar Wilde

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

— Oscar Wilde

The mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-?-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

— Oscar Wilde