Oscar Wilde - Man Quotes

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

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

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
With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

Oscar Wilde
While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.

Oscar Wilde
If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.

Oscar Wilde
The Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.

Oscar Wilde
A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.

Oscar Wilde
Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.

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
When I see a spade, I call it a spade. I'm glad to say I have never seen a spade. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use it. It's the only thing he's fit for.

Oscar Wilde
The mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

Oscar Wilde
If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.

Oscar Wilde
A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.

Oscar Wilde
A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.

Oscar Wilde
Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex, multiform creature that bears within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh is tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

Oscar Wilde
The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.

Oscar Wilde
The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself.

Oscar Wilde
Is this the end of all that primal force Which, in its changes being still the same, From eyeless Chaos cleft its upward course, Through ravenous seas and whirling rocks and flame, Till the suns met in heaven and began Their cycles, and the morning stars sang, and the Word was Man!

Oscar Wilde
No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.

Oscar Wilde
Just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in trying to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate himself.

Oscar Wilde
What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence.

Oscar Wilde
It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.

Oscar Wilde
Who is that man over there? I don't know him. What is he doing? Is he a conspirator? Have you searched him? Give him till tomorrow to confess, then hang him! -- hang him!

Oscar Wilde
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.

Oscar Wilde
It is curious how vanity helps the successful man and wrecks the failure.

Oscar Wilde
On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.

Oscar Wilde