Oscar Wilde Quotes

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It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it

Oscar Wilde
It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But…it is better to be good than to be ugly.

Oscar Wilde
No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.

Oscar Wilde
She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.

Oscar Wilde
I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.

Oscar Wilde
Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid. Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.

Oscar Wilde
I have never learned anything except from people younger than myself.

Oscar Wilde
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Oscar Wilde
I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

Oscar Wilde
Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.

Oscar Wilde
We have quite the same ideas. No; I think our ideas are quite different. But he has been most pleasant.

Oscar Wilde
Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.

Oscar Wilde
As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.

Oscar Wilde
When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting.

Oscar Wilde
Newspapers, even, have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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