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Abstinence
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Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.
-Oscar Wilde
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Action(s)
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To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.
-Oscar Wilde
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Actors, Acting
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While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.
-Oscar Wilde
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Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
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I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
-Oscar Wilde
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Advice
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LORD GORING:
I am glad you have called. I am going to give you some good advice.
MRS. CHEVELEY:
Oh! pray don't. One should never give a woman anything that she can't wear in the evening.
-Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband: Act 3
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LORD GORING:
My father told me to go to bed an hour ago. I don't see why I shouldn't give you the same advice. I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
-Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, Act 1
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Age
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MRS. ALLONBY: She told me yesterday, and in quite a loud voice too, that she was only eighteen. It was most annoying.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything.
-Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
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The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
-Oscar Wilde
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No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
-Oscar Wilde
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I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.
-Oscar Wilde
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I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not.
-Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan, 1892
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That does not seem to me to be a grave objection. Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. Lady Dumbleton is an instance in point. To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was many years ago now. I see no reason why our dear Cecily should not be even still more attractive at the age you mention than she is at present. There will be a large accumulation of property.
-Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (spoken by the character Lady Bracknell), 1893
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America
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America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
-Oscar Wilde
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America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
-Oscar Wilde
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The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.
-Oscar Wilde
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There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.
-Oscar Wilde
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Anarchy
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People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.
-Oscar Wilde
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Anger
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Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act according with the dictates of reason.
-Oscar Wilde
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Appearance
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It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
-Oscar Wilde
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Argument & Debate
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Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
-Oscar Wilde
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I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.
-Oscar Wilde
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Aristocracy
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You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.
-Oscar Wilde
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Art
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Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
-Oscar Wilde
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In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
-Oscar Wilde
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Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One
-Oscar Wilde
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No great artist ever sees things as they really are, if he did he would cease to be an artist.
-Oscar Wilde
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Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.
-Oscar Wilde
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Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
-Oscar Wilde
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All art is quite useless.
-Oscar Wilde
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All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.
-Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Living, 1891
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Artist, The
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It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.
-Oscar Wilde, from Intentions
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Attitude
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The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
-Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan
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Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
-Oscar Wilde
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Authors & Writing
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One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.
-Oscar Wilde
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The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
-Oscar Wilde
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This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.
-Oscar Wilde
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From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
-Oscar Wilde
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His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
-Oscar Wilde
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Beauty
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And beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (ch. 2)
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It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.
-Oscar Wilde
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I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.
-Oscar Wilde
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Belief
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The old believe everything; the middle aged suspect everything, and the young know everything.
-Oscar Wilde
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Blame
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There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.
-Oscar Wilde
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Books
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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
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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
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Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
-Oscar Wilde
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Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.
-Oscar Wilde
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Business
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It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties.
-Oscar Wilde
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Career, Vocation
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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
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Change
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It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
-Oscar Wilde
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Charisma
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All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.
-Oscar Wilde
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It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
-Oscar Wilde
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Charity
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Charity creates a multitude of sins.
-Oscar Wilde
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As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.
-Oscar Wilde
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Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.
-Oscar Wilde
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Children
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The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
-Oscar Wilde
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Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
-Oscar Wilde
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Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.
-Oscar Wilde
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City Life, Cities
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The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.
-Oscar Wilde
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Civilization
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Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.
-Oscar Wilde
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Class
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Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.
-Oscar Wilde
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Color
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He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.
-Oscar Wilde
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Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
-Oscar Wilde
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Committee
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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
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Common Sense
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Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
-Oscar Wilde
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Communism
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To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.
-Oscar Wilde
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When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.
-Oscar Wilde
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Conspiracy
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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
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Contradiction
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The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
-Oscar Wilde
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Conversation
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Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.
-Oscar Wilde
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Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.
-Oscar Wilde
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I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments.
-Oscar Wilde
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Cooking, Culinary
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To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist -- the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar.
-Oscar Wilde
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Criticism
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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
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That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.
-Oscar Wilde
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Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.
-Oscar Wilde
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The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
-Oscar Wilde
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I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across ... Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best. The mortality among pianists in that place is marvellous.
-Oscar Wilde, Impressions of America, 1906
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Crying
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Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.
-Oscar Wilde
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Curiosity
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The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
-Oscar Wilde
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Death
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Once can survive everything nowadays, except death.
-Oscar Wilde
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Alas, I am dying beyond my means.
-Oscar Wilde
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For he who lives more lives than one: More deaths than one must die.
-Oscar Wilde
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I am dying beyond my means.
-Oscar Wilde
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Debt / Borrow / Loan
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It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
-Oscar Wilde
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Deception/Lying
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The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.
-Oscar Wilde
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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
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Democracy
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Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
-Oscar Wilde
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Despair
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Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night.
-Oscar Wilde
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She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
-Oscar Wilde
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Determination
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Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
-Oscar Wilde
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Devotion
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Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
-Oscar Wilde
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Differences
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There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it, from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 1, pg. 4, 1891
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Discontent
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Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
-Oscar Wilde
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Divorce
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It is he who has broken the bond of marriage -- not I. I only break its bondage.
-Oscar Wilde
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Doubt
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Skepticism is the beginning of Faith.
-Oscar Wilde
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Dreams
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Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.
-Oscar Wilde
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A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
-Oscar Wilde
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Drinking
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There can be nothing more frequent than an occasional drink.
-Oscar Wilde
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Duty
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Oh, duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.
-Oscar Wilde
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The first duty of life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one as yet discovered.
-Oscar Wilde
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Education
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The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence.
-Oscar Wilde
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Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.
-Oscar Wilde
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Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.
-Oscar Wilde
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In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.
-Oscar Wilde
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The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.
-Oscar Wilde
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I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don't degrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go out into the night. Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful still. Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?
-Oscar Wilde, Intentions: The critic as artist, 1890
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Emotions
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The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
-Oscar Wilde
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A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.
-Oscar Wilde
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Enemy, Enemies
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A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
-Oscar Wilde
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Envy / Jealousy
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Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.
-Oscar Wilde
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Ethics
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No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
-Oscar Wilde
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Evangelism
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Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
-Oscar Wilde
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Evil
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Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attraction of others.
-Oscar Wilde
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As a wicked man I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back.
-Oscar Wilde
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Excellence
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I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
-Oscar Wilde
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Excess
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Where there is no extravagance there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.
-Oscar Wilde
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Exile
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For his mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.
-Oscar Wilde
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Experience
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We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
-Oscar Wilde
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Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
-Oscar Wilde, attributed, no source found
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Face, Faces
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A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
-Oscar Wilde
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Failure
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Misfortunes one can endure -- they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults -- Ah! there is the sting of life.
-Oscar Wilde
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Faith
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I can believe anything provided it is incredible.
-Oscar Wilde
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Family
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Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
-Oscar Wilde
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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
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As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
-Oscar Wilde
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Fantasy
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One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.
-Oscar Wilde
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Fashion
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Woman's first duty in life is to her dressmaker. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.
-Oscar Wilde
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Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.
-Oscar Wilde
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Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
-Oscar Wilde
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Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment the universal.
-Oscar Wilde
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One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
-Oscar Wilde
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For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.
-Oscar Wilde
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Fate & Destiny
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One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
-Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
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Father
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The American father is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher.
-Oscar Wilde
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Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
-Oscar Wilde
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Flowers
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Flowers are as common in the country as people are in London.
-Oscar Wilde
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Food
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Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
-Oscar Wilde
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Forgiveness
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Always forgive your enemies -- nothing annoys them so much.
-Oscar Wilde
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Fortune
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There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.
-Oscar Wilde
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Friends
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An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship.
-Oscar Wilde
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Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
-Oscar Wilde
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True friends stab you in the front.
-Oscar Wilde
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Gambling (Gaming)
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One should always play fair when one has the winning cards.
-Oscar Wilde
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Generations
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The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.
-Oscar Wilde
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Genius
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I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
-Oscar Wilde
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Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.
-Oscar Wilde
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I have nothing to declare except my genius.
-Oscar Wilde
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The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
-Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891
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Gentlemen
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A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude.
-Oscar Wilde
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Goals
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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-Oscar Wilde
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Goodness
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If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
-Oscar Wilde
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To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
-Oscar Wilde
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Gossip
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There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
-Oscar Wilde
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It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one, behind one's back, that are absolutely and entirely true.
-Oscar Wilde
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Government
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Yes, I am a thorough republican. No other form of government is so favorable to the growth of art.
-Oscar Wilde
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Guests
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Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses -- once!
-Oscar Wilde
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Happiness
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When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
-Oscar Wilde
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Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
-Oscar Wilde
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History
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To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
-Oscar Wilde
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Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
-Oscar Wilde
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Honesty
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It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
-Oscar Wilde
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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
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Hospitality
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I'm sure I don't know half the people who come to my house. Indeed, from all I hear, I shouldn't like to.
-Oscar Wilde
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Housework
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Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.
-Oscar Wilde
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Humanity
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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
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The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.
-Oscar Wilde
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I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
-Oscar Wilde
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It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.
-Oscar Wilde
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Hunting
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One knows so well the popular idea of health. The English country gentleman galloping after a fox -- the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
-Oscar Wilde
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Hypocrisy
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How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say.
-Oscar Wilde
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And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, none knew so well as I: for he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.
-Oscar Wilde
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How pleasant it was in the garden! And how delightful other people's emotions were! -- much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends -- those were the fascinating things in life. He pictured to himself with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had missed by staying so long with Basil Hallward. Had be gone to his aunt's, he would have been sure to have met Lord Goodbody there, and the whole conversation would have been about the feeding of the poor and the necessity for model lodging-houses. Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour. It was charming to have escaped all that!
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 1
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Idealism
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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
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Ideas
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The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 1 Lord Henry speaking, 1891
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Identity
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Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
-Oscar Wilde
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Life is too important to be taken seriously.
-Oscar Wilde
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It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
-Oscar Wilde
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Ignorance & Stupidity
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The greatest of all sins is stupidity.
-Oscar Wilde
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The only thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them.
-Oscar Wilde
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Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.
-Oscar Wilde
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Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone.
-Oscar Wilde
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Illness, Disease, Sickness
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The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.
-Oscar Wilde
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Illusion
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The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.
-Oscar Wilde
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Imagination
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Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.
-Oscar Wilde
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The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
-Oscar Wilde
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Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative.
-Oscar Wilde
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Individuality
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My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.
-Oscar Wilde
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Information
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Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.
-Oscar Wilde
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Innocence
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Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.
-Oscar Wilde
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Insults
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What is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.
-Oscar Wilde
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Integrity
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I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.
-Oscar Wilde, Lord Henry, in the The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 6, 1891
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Intelligence
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Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.
-Oscar Wilde
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The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.
-Oscar Wilde
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Interviews
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Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.
-Oscar Wilde
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Investment
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With an evening coat and a white tie, anybody, even a stock broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.
-Oscar Wilde
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Journalism
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It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.
-Oscar Wilde
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Justice
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All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.
-Oscar Wilde
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Kindness
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A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people's toes.
-Oscar Wilde
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Kisses
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A kiss may ruin a human life.
-Oscar Wilde
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Knowledge
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There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating --people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
-Oscar Wilde
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Language
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We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
-Oscar Wilde
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Last Words
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And now, I am dying beyond my means. Sipping champagne on his deathbed
-Oscar Wilde
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Learning
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The mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-?-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
-Oscar Wilde
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Legacy
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Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
-Oscar Wilde
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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
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I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.
-Oscar Wilde
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Liberty
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When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.
-Oscar Wilde
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Life
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The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion.
-Oscar Wilde
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We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.
-Oscar Wilde
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To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
-Oscar Wilde
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The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.
-Oscar Wilde
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Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic
-Oscar Wilde
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Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.
-Oscar Wilde
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Literary
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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, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
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Love
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Yet each man kills the thing he loves from all let this be heard some does it with a bitter look some with a flattering word the coward does it with a kiss the brave man with the sword.
-Oscar Wilde
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One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
-Oscar Wilde
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Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
-Oscar Wilde
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When a man has once loved a woman, he will do anything for her, except continue to love her.
-Oscar Wilde
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There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
-Oscar Wilde
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There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about.
-Oscar Wilde
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Loyalty
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If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
-Oscar Wilde
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Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.
-Oscar Wilde
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Mankind, Man
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It will be a marvellous thing - the true personality of man - when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flower-like, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet, while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less surely. For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether things happened or did not happen. Nor will it admit any laws but its own laws; nor any authority but its own authority. Yet it will love those who sought to intensify it, and speak often of them. And of these Christ was one.
Know Thyself was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, Be Thyself shall be written. And the message of Christ to man was simply Be Thyself. That is the secret of Christ.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, "Fortnightly Review", February, 1891
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Marriage
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Pardon me, you are not engaged to any one. When you do become engaged to some one, I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself.
-Oscar Wilde
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People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect -- simply a confession of failures.
-Oscar Wilde
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What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
-Oscar Wilde
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When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
-Oscar Wilde
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Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.
-Oscar Wilde
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They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.
-Oscar Wilde
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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
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Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.
-Oscar Wilde
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Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which is never advisable.
-Oscar Wilde
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They are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.
-Oscar Wilde
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The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.
-Oscar Wilde
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London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognize them. They look so thoroughly unhappy.
-Oscar Wilde
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Martyr, Martyrdom
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No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.
-Oscar Wilde
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Maturity
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My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
-Oscar Wilde
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Media
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In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.
-Oscar Wilde
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By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
-Oscar Wilde
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Memory
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Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.
-Oscar Wilde
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Men
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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
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Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.
-Oscar Wilde
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By persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful.
-Oscar Wilde
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Men & Women
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A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
-Oscar Wilde
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Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
-Oscar Wilde
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The fact is, you have fallen lately, Cecily, into a bad habit of thinking for yourself. You should give it up. It is not quite womanly... men don't like it.
-Oscar Wilde
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Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
-Oscar Wilde
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The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.
-Oscar Wilde
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Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
-Oscar Wilde
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Mind, the
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What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?
-Oscar Wilde
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Mistakes
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Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.
-Oscar Wilde
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None of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
-Oscar Wilde
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Moderation
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Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
-Oscar Wilde
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Modern, Modernism
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It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.
-Oscar Wilde
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Money
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When I was young I used to think that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old, I know it is.
-Oscar Wilde
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There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
-Oscar Wilde
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There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
-Oscar Wilde
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It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
-Oscar Wilde
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Morals
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Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
-Oscar Wilde
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A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.
-Oscar Wilde
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There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.
-Oscar Wilde
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Mother
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All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.
-Oscar Wilde
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Murder
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Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
-Oscar Wilde
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Music
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Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
-Oscar Wilde
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Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.
-Oscar Wilde
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If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.
-Oscar Wilde
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...music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual. It is through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate impression itself.
-Oscar Wilde, Intentions
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Nature
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I never saw a man who looked with such a wistful eye upon that little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky.
-Oscar Wilde
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Necessity
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We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
-Oscar Wilde
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News
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Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.
-Oscar Wilde
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Obedience
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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
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Opinion
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No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.
-Oscar Wilde
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Public Opinion... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.
-Oscar Wilde
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Paradox
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The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them.
-Oscar Wilde
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Parenting
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To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune... to lose both seems like carelessness.
-Oscar Wilde
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Past, the
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One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
-Oscar Wilde
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People
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It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
-Oscar Wilde
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Perfection
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The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
-Oscar Wilde
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The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.
-Oscar Wilde
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Pessimism
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A pessimist is one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
-Oscar Wilde
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Play/Games
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The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
-Oscar Wilde
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The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
-Oscar Wilde
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Pleasure
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Pleasure is Nature
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, "Fortnightly Review (London)", February, 1891
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Poetry
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A poet can survive anything but a misprint.
-Oscar Wilde
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Politics
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Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.
-Oscar Wilde
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I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.
-Oscar Wilde
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He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.
-Oscar Wilde
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Portraits
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Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
-Oscar Wilde
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Poverty
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Who, being loved, is poor?
-Oscar Wilde
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As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.
-Oscar Wilde
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In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.
-Oscar Wilde
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Like two doomed ships that pass in storm we had crossed each other's way: but we made no sign, we said no word, we had no word to say.
-Oscar Wilde
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Praise
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Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the two sexes.
-Oscar Wilde
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Prayer
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When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
-Oscar Wilde
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Prejudice
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One can only give an unbiased opinion about things that do not interest one, which is no doubt the reason an unbiased opinion is always valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.
-Oscar Wilde
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Present, the
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He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.
-Oscar Wilde
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Presidency
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In America, the President reigns for four years, and journalism governs for ever and ever.
-Oscar Wilde
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Principles
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I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
-Oscar Wilde
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Prison
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I know not whether Laws be right or whether Laws be wrong; all that we know who live in gaol is that the wall is strong; and that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
-Oscar Wilde
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Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
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The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.
-Oscar Wilde
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Whatever harsh criticisms may be passed on the construction of her sentences, she at least possesses that one touch of vulgarity that makes the whole world kin.
-Oscar Wilde
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Vulgarity is the conduct of other people, just as falsehoods are the truths of other people.
-Oscar Wilde
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Professionalism
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There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.
-Oscar Wilde
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An ordinary man away from home giving advice.
-Oscar Wilde
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Progress
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Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.
-Oscar Wilde
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Protest
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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 civilization.
-Oscar Wilde
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Proverbial Wisdom
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In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.
-Oscar Wilde
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He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone.
-Oscar Wilde
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Psychiatry
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The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.
-Oscar Wilde
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Public
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The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.
-Oscar Wilde
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Punctuality
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He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
-Oscar Wilde
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Punctuality is the thief of time. Wilde I never travel without my diary. One should always have Something sensational to read in the train.
-Oscar Wilde
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Purity
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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
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Purpose
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We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
-Oscar Wilde
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Quotations
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Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
-Oscar Wilde
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Reading
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The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
-Oscar Wilde
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There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.
-Oscar Wilde
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Reality
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I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
-Oscar Wilde
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Reason
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I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
-Oscar Wilde
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Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
-Oscar Wilde
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Recognition
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Popularity is the only insult that has not yet been offered to Mr. Whistler.
-Oscar Wilde
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Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.
-Oscar Wilde
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Relationships
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The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it. As for marriage, of course that would be silly, but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women. I will certainly encourage them. They have the charm of being fashionable.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890
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Religion
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Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
-Oscar Wilde
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Reputation
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One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything except a good reputation.
-Oscar Wilde
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Respect
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Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. They a
-Oscar Wilde
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The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.
-Oscar Wilde
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Romance
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To love oneself is the beginning of a life long romance.
-Oscar Wilde
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Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.
-Oscar Wilde
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He must have a truly romantic nature, for he weeps when there is nothing at all to weep about.
-Oscar Wilde
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Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman.
-Oscar Wilde
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When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
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Royalty, Kings, Queens
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There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.
-Oscar Wilde
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Sadness
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Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
-Oscar Wilde
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For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.
-Oscar Wilde, De Profoundis
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How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?
-Oscar Wilde
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Saint, Saints
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It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
-Oscar Wilde
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Security
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It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
-Oscar Wilde
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Selfishness
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Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
-Oscar Wilde
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Shame
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Scandal: gossip made tedious by morality.
-Oscar Wilde
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One should never make one's debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age.
-Oscar Wilde
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Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
-Oscar Wilde
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She is absolutely inadmissible into society. Many a woman has a past, but I am told that she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit.
-Oscar Wilde
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Shopping
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The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.
-Oscar Wilde
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Silence
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He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.
-Oscar Wilde
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Simplicity
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The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are very difficult to interpret (understand). Great passion are for the great of souls. Great events can only be seen by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.
-Oscar Wilde
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Sin
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The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
-Oscar Wilde
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What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colorless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.
-Oscar Wilde
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There is no sin except stupidity.
-Oscar Wilde
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Sincerity
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A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
-Oscar Wilde
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Slavery
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The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
-Oscar Wilde
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Society
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Never speak disrespectfully of Society. Only people who can't get into it do that.
-Oscar Wilde
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Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.
-Oscar Wilde
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Soul
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How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.
-Oscar Wilde
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Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
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Speeches (oratory)
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Lots of people act well, but few people talk well. This shows that talking is the more difficult of the two.
-Oscar Wilde
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Talk to a woman as if you loved her, and to a man as if he bored you.
-Oscar Wilde
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State
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The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.
-Oscar Wilde
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Style
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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 is personality, which no one should copy; the second is perfection, which all should aim at.
-Oscar Wilde
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Good taste is the excuse I have given for leading such a bad life.
-Oscar Wilde
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Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art.
-Oscar Wilde
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Success & Failure
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Nothing succeeds like success.
-Oscar Wilde
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Suffering
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To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
-Oscar Wilde
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I can sympathize with everything, except suffering.
-Oscar Wilde
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Sunshine
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Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.
-Oscar Wilde
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Superstition
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There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
-Oscar Wilde
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Sympathy
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There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the color, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
-Oscar Wilde
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Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.
-Oscar Wilde
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Tact, Tactfulness
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To have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact, talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you.
-Oscar Wilde
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Talent
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Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music -- his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting -- that which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and all modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.
-Oscar Wilde
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Taxation
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Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
-Oscar Wilde
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Teaching
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Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
-Oscar Wilde
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Temptation
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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
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Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.
-Oscar Wilde
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But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
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Theater
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The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
-Oscar Wilde
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Thought
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Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.
-Oscar Wilde
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A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one's neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him.
-Oscar Wilde, The soul of man under Socialism (essay), 1891
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Time
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Time is waste of money.
-Oscar Wilde
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Torture
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The community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891
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Tragedy
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In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst; the last is a real tragedy!
-Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
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It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.
-Oscar Wilde
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Travel
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I was disappointed in Niagara -- most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.
-Oscar Wilde
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I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.
-Oscar Wilde
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Truth
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A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
-Oscar Wilde
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If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
-Oscar Wilde
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The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
-Oscar Wilde
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Tyranny
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The worst form of tyranny the world has ever known the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.
-Oscar Wilde
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There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.
-Oscar Wilde
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Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.
-Oscar Wilde
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Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.
-Oscar Wilde
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War
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As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have it's fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
-Oscar Wilde
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Weakness
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She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
-Oscar Wilde
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Wealth
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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
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Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
-Oscar Wilde
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He rides in the row at ten o clock in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night of the season. You don't call that leading an idle life, do you?
-Oscar Wilde
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Weather
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Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else.
-Oscar Wilde
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Women
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Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.
-Oscar Wilde
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There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.
-Oscar Wilde
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The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored.
-Oscar Wilde
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Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat.
-Oscar Wilde
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Work
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Work is the curse of the drinking class.
-Oscar Wilde
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Work is a refuge of people who have nothing better to do.
-Oscar Wilde
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Worry
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The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last.
-Oscar Wilde
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Youth
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Those whom the gods love grow young.
-Oscar Wilde
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In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
-Oscar Wilde
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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
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Books by and about Oscar Wilde
