Oscar Wilde Quotations

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.

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

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

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

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

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

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

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

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

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.

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.

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

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

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But... it is better to be good than to be ugly.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat.

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

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

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

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

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

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.

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

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

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

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

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

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

The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.

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

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

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

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.

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

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

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.

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

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

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

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

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

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

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

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

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

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

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

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

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

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

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

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

If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

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

She is a peacock in everything but beauty!

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

To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.

An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

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.

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.

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

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

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.