Oscar Wilde

Cultivated leisure is the aim of man.

— Oscar Wilde

When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.

— Oscar Wilde

The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.

— Oscar Wilde

As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.

— Oscar Wilde

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.

— Oscar Wilde

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

— Oscar Wilde

The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.

— Oscar Wilde

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

— Oscar Wilde

Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.

— Oscar Wilde

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

— Oscar Wilde

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

— Oscar Wilde

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.

— Oscar Wilde

Yet each man kills the thing he loves from all let this be heard some does it with a bitter look some with a flattering word the coward does it with a kiss the brave man with the sword.

— Oscar Wilde

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

— Oscar Wilde

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

— Oscar Wilde

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

— Oscar Wilde

When a man has once loved a woman, he will do anything for her, except continue to love her.

— Oscar Wilde

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

— Oscar Wilde

There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about.

— Oscar Wilde

If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

— Oscar Wilde

When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

— Oscar Wilde

Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.

— Oscar Wilde

They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.

— Oscar Wilde

On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.

— Oscar Wilde

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

— Oscar Wilde

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

— Oscar Wilde

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

— Oscar Wilde

My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.

— Oscar Wilde

In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.

— Oscar Wilde

I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.

— Oscar Wilde

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

— Oscar Wilde

The Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.

— Oscar Wilde

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

— Oscar Wilde

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

— Oscar Wilde

The fact is, you have fallen lately, Cecily, into a bad habit of thinking for yourself. You should give it up. It is not quite womanly... men don't like it.

— Oscar Wilde

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.

— Oscar Wilde

What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.

— Oscar Wilde

Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.

— Oscar Wilde

Life would be dull without them.

— Oscar Wilde

For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.

— Oscar Wilde

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

— Oscar Wilde

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

— Oscar Wilde

When I was young I used to think that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old, I know it is.

— Oscar Wilde

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

— Oscar Wilde

If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.

— Oscar Wilde

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.

— Oscar Wilde

A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.

— Oscar Wilde

Morality is the attitude we adopt toward people whom we personally dislike.

— Oscar Wilde

There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.

— Oscar Wilde

Lord Illingworth: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. Mrs. Allonby: No man does. That is his.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

— Oscar Wilde

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

— Oscar Wilde

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

— Oscar Wilde

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

— Oscar Wilde

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

— Oscar Wilde

We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

— Oscar Wilde

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

— Oscar Wilde

Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.

— Oscar Wilde

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

— Oscar Wilde

The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.

— Oscar Wilde

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

— Oscar Wilde

For his mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.

— Oscar Wilde

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

— Oscar Wilde

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them.

— Oscar Wilde

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune... to lose both seems like carelessness.

— Oscar Wilde

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.

— Oscar Wilde

The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.

— Oscar Wilde

A pessimist is one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.

— Oscar Wilde

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.

— Oscar Wilde

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

— Oscar Wilde

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.

— Oscar Wilde

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

— Oscar Wilde

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.

— Oscar Wilde

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

— Oscar Wilde

Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.

— Oscar Wilde

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.

— Oscar Wilde

He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.

— Oscar Wilde

Popularity is the only insult that has not yet been offered to Mr. Whistler.

— Oscar Wilde

Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.

— Oscar Wilde

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

— Oscar Wilde

Who, being loved, is poor?

— Oscar Wilde

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.

— Oscar Wilde

In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.

— Oscar Wilde

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

— Oscar Wilde

One can only give an unbiased opinion about things that do not interest one, which is no doubt the reason an unbiased opinion is always valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.

— Oscar Wilde

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.

— Oscar Wilde

In America, the President reigns for four years, and journalism governs for ever and ever.

— Oscar Wilde

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

— Oscar Wilde

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

— Oscar Wilde

I know not whether Laws be right or whether Laws be wrong; all that we know who live in gaol is that the wall is strong; and that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

— Oscar Wilde

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

— Oscar Wilde

Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.

— Oscar Wilde

If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.

— Oscar Wilde

What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one's death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That's all that can be said about land.

— Oscar Wilde

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

— Oscar Wilde