Oscar Wilde Quotes

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Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither

Oscar Wilde
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

Oscar Wilde
Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.

Oscar Wilde
Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.

Oscar Wilde
Tread Lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.

Oscar Wilde
Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life

Oscar Wilde
Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

Oscar Wilde
He wants to enslave you.' 'I shudder at the thought of being free.

Oscar Wilde
I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!

Oscar Wilde
The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.

Oscar Wilde
In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

Oscar Wilde
Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.

Oscar Wilde
We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, that fire can purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all.

Oscar Wilde
The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever.

Oscar Wilde
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde
The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If I ever marry, I'll try to forget the fact.

Oscar Wilde
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.

Oscar Wilde
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

Oscar Wilde
What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.

Oscar Wilde
Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.

Oscar Wilde
But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.

Oscar Wilde
I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.

Oscar Wilde
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

Oscar Wilde
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.

Oscar Wilde
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

Oscar Wilde
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

Oscar Wilde
And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

Oscar Wilde
Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon. I'm feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell. That's not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.

Oscar Wilde
I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else.

Oscar Wilde
Even the disciple has his uses. He stands behind one's throne, and at the moment of one's triumph whispers in one's ear that, after all, one is immortal.

Oscar Wilde