Oscar Wilde Quotes

1,069 Sourced Quotes

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Oscar Wilde
You told me you had destroyed it." "I was wrong. It has destroyed me.

Oscar Wilde
Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it comes into existence.

Oscar Wilde
Fashion rests upon folly. Art rests upon law. Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. Indeed what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months!

Oscar Wilde
Charity, dear Miss Prism, charity! None of us are perfect. I myself am peculiarly susceptible to draughts.

Oscar Wilde
If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

Oscar Wilde
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

Oscar Wilde
LADY BRACKNELL Algernon is an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, eligible young man. He has nothing, but he looks everything. What more can one desire?

Oscar Wilde
Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.

Oscar Wilde
He is a typical Englishman, always dull and usually violent.

Oscar Wilde
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Oscar Wilde
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.

Oscar Wilde
Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illuminated by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything except tell a story. As an artist he is everything, except articulate.

Oscar Wilde
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.

Oscar Wilde
The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one's heart to stone.

Oscar Wilde
And down the long and silent street,
The dawn, with silver-sandaled feet,
Crept like a frightened girl.

Oscar Wilde
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

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 true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Oscar Wilde
But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.

Oscar Wilde
It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.

Oscar Wilde
One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art.

Oscar Wilde
Come, dear, [Gwendolen rises] we have already missed five, if not six, trains. To miss any more might expose us to comment on the platform.

Oscar Wilde
Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation.

Oscar Wilde
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

Oscar Wilde
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

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

Oscar Wilde
I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.

Oscar Wilde
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.

Oscar Wilde
Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable.

Oscar Wilde