Oscar Wilde Quotes

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

Oscar Wilde
The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pères ont toujours tort.

Oscar Wilde
Gerald: I suppose society is wonderfully delightful?
Lord Illingworth: To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy.

Oscar Wilde
There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

Oscar Wilde
Life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

Oscar Wilde
I was disappointed with Niagara—most people must be disappointed with Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest disappointments in American married life.

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

Oscar Wilde
I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.

Oscar Wilde
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 warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.

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

Oscar Wilde
With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

Oscar Wilde
Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

Oscar Wilde
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

Oscar Wilde
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.

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

Oscar Wilde
I am thoroughly sick of pearls. They make one look so plain, so good and so intellectual.

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
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

Oscar Wilde
He played with the idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox.

Oscar Wilde
The wild Bee reels from bough to bough
With his furry coat and his gauzy wing,
Now in a lily cup, and now
Setting a jacinth bell a-swing,
In his wandering.

Oscar Wilde
Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.

Oscar Wilde
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

Oscar Wilde
And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of Spring,
And the rose-bud breaks into pink on the climbing briar,
And the crocus-bed is a quivering moon of fire
Girdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring.

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 State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.

Oscar Wilde
Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world's tongue.

Oscar Wilde
Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.

Oscar Wilde
I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her.

Oscar Wilde
And, by the way, one of the most delightful things I find in America is meeting a people without prejudice -- everywhere open to the truth.

Oscar Wilde
JACK: It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produces a false impression.

Oscar Wilde