Oscar Wilde Quotes

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Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Oscar Wilde
One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

Oscar Wilde
When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.

Oscar Wilde
I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart.

Oscar Wilde
Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable

Oscar Wilde
He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.

Oscar Wilde
Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.

Oscar Wilde
I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.

Oscar Wilde
Shaw has not an enemy in the world; and none of his friends like him.

Oscar Wilde
There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.

Oscar Wilde
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.

Oscar Wilde
I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

Oscar Wilde
Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.

Oscar Wilde
Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb a the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Oscar Wilde
I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

Oscar Wilde
I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.

Oscar Wilde
What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true.

Oscar Wilde
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

Oscar Wilde
By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.

Oscar Wilde
Wilde: I shall always regard you as the best critic of my plays.
Tree: But I have never criticized your plays.
Wilde: That's why.

Oscar Wilde
Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade. Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

Oscar Wilde
We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.

Oscar Wilde
Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Oscar Wilde
All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns.

Oscar Wilde
Human life—that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.

Oscar Wilde
We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

Oscar Wilde
The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.

Oscar Wilde
There is a fatality about good resolutions – that they are always made too late

Oscar Wilde
There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.

Oscar Wilde
Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do.

Oscar Wilde