Oscar Wilde Quotes

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Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.

Oscar Wilde
Lady Hunstanton: But do you believe all that is written in the newspapers?
Lord Illingworth: I do. Nowadays it is only the unreadable that occurs.

Oscar Wilde
We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

Oscar Wilde
And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine Burned like the ruby fire set In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine, Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate, Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine.

Oscar Wilde
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it has merely been detected.

Oscar Wilde
A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

Oscar Wilde
The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ

Oscar Wilde
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Oscar Wilde
I like talking to a brick wall- it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!

Oscar Wilde
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

Oscar Wilde
I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.

Oscar Wilde
The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.

Oscar Wilde
To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.

Oscar Wilde
On George Bernard Shaw An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him.

Oscar Wilde
My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly, madly! You didn't know it then-you know it now.

Oscar Wilde
The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

Oscar Wilde
It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

Oscar Wilde
The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.

Oscar Wilde
It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.

Oscar Wilde
I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.

Oscar Wilde
Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Oscar Wilde
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Oscar Wilde
Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea.

Oscar Wilde
Action [...] is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

Oscar Wilde
What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.

Oscar Wilde
We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes...

Oscar Wilde
A method of procuring sensations? Do you think then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again? Don't tell me that." says Dorian. "Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," says Lord Henry

Oscar Wilde
Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.

Oscar Wilde
No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

Oscar Wilde
The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid

Oscar Wilde