Oscar Wilde Quotes

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It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of the world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

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

Oscar Wilde
Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.

Oscar Wilde
Facts fled before philosophy like frightened forest things.

Oscar Wilde
When I see a spade, I call it a spade. I'm glad to say I have never seen a spade. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use it. It's the only thing he's fit for.

Oscar Wilde
A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen.

Oscar Wilde
Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly

Oscar Wilde
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

Oscar Wilde
Early in life she had discovered the important truth that nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion; and by a series of reckless escapades, half of them quite harmless, she had acquired all the privileges of a personality.

Oscar Wilde
Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.

Oscar Wilde
I can understand archaeology being attacked on the ground of its excessive realism, but to attack it as pedantic seems to be very much beside the mark. However, to attack it for any reason is foolish; one might just as well speak disrespectfully of the equator.

Oscar Wilde
When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realize that the one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action. He, indeed, knows neither the origin of his deeds nor their results.

Oscar Wilde
Chrysanthemums from gilded argosy Unload their gaudy scentless merchandise.

Oscar Wilde
Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.

Oscar Wilde
The beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance... living on the memory of crushing defeats

Oscar Wilde
I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

Oscar Wilde
Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.

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

Oscar Wilde
More women grow old nowadays through the faithfulness of their admirers than through anything else.

Oscar Wilde
The sky was as a shield that caught the stain Of blood and battle from the dying sun.

Oscar Wilde
In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.... The Japanese people are... simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.

Oscar Wilde
The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it.

Oscar Wilde
Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.

Oscar Wilde
What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.

Oscar Wilde
I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all.

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
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
I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.

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
The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.

Oscar Wilde