Oscar Wilde Quotes

1,069 Sourced Quotes

And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity's machine.

Oscar Wilde
Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Oscar Wilde
It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.

Oscar Wilde
"She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses," cried the young Student; "but in all my garden there is no red rose."

Oscar Wilde
I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.

Oscar Wilde
To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies.

Oscar Wilde
The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.

Oscar Wilde
Do you really think, Arthur, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to.

Oscar Wilde
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.

Oscar Wilde
Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.

Oscar Wilde
I find I have, and a heart doesn't suit me, Windermere. Somehow it doesn't go with modern dress. It makes one look old.

Oscar Wilde
To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

Oscar Wilde
Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.

Oscar Wilde
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

Oscar Wilde
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

Oscar Wilde
I know that handwriting…I remember it perfectly. The ten commandments in every stroke of the pen, and the moral law all over the page.

Oscar Wilde
Lord Caversham: No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex.
Lord Goring: Quite so. And we men are so self-sacrificing that we never use it, do we, father?

Oscar Wilde
I have been right, Basil, haven't I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare's plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

Oscar Wilde
However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive.

Oscar Wilde
Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

Oscar Wilde
It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country

Oscar Wilde
I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

Oscar Wilde
Early in life she had discovered the important truth that nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion; and by a series of reckless escapades, half of them quite harmless, she had acquired all the privileges of a personality.

Oscar Wilde
Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.

Oscar Wilde
I can understand archaeology being attacked on the ground of its excessive realism, but to attack it as pedantic seems to be very much beside the mark. However, to attack it for any reason is foolish; one might just as well speak disrespectfully of the equator.

Oscar Wilde
When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realize that the one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action. He, indeed, knows neither the origin of his deeds nor their results.

Oscar Wilde
Chrysanthemums from gilded argosy Unload their gaudy scentless merchandise.

Oscar Wilde
Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.

Oscar Wilde
The beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance... living on the memory of crushing defeats

Oscar Wilde
The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it.

Oscar Wilde