Oscar Wilde Quotes

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To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.

Oscar Wilde
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

Oscar Wilde
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.

Oscar Wilde
You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid

Oscar Wilde
Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Oscar Wilde
I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

Oscar Wilde
I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.

Oscar Wilde
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

Oscar Wilde
To be really medieval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.

Oscar Wilde
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless...

Oscar Wilde
I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Oscar Wilde
The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

Oscar Wilde
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde
While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy.

Oscar Wilde
Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile.

Oscar Wilde
Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.

Oscar Wilde
It is, perhaps, worth while to note that what many people call Americanisms are really old English expressions which have lingered in our colonies while they have been lost in our own country.

Oscar Wilde
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.

Oscar Wilde
I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.

Oscar Wilde
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Oscar Wilde
One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Oscar Wilde
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

Oscar Wilde
In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself.

Oscar Wilde
The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

Oscar Wilde
Lord Illingworth: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.
Mrs. Allonby: It ends with Revelations.

Oscar Wilde
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Oscar Wilde
I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

Oscar Wilde
My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.

Oscar Wilde
I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it.

Oscar Wilde
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

Oscar Wilde