Oscar Wilde Quotes

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Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy.

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

Oscar Wilde
A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.

Oscar Wilde
The sin was mine; I did not understand. So now is music prisoned in her cave, Save where some ebbing desultory wave Frets with its restless whirls this meagre strand...

Oscar Wilde
Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.

Oscar Wilde
People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.

Oscar Wilde
Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.

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
The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not its growth and development.

Oscar Wilde
It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.

Oscar Wilde
The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.

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
Children have a natural antipathy to books- handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous.

Oscar Wilde
I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

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
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 find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.

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

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
While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.

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

Oscar Wilde
Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

Oscar Wilde
Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.

Oscar Wilde
One pale woman all alone,
The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone.

Oscar Wilde
Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them

Oscar Wilde
GILBERT: No ignoble consideration of probability, that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, effect it ever.

Oscar Wilde
The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

Oscar Wilde