Oscar Wilde Quotes

812 Quotes on Love, Forgiveness, Rebellion, and Embracing Your Unique Voice

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

“You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”

“Life is too short to learn German”

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”

“I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”

“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”

“I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.”

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

“Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.”

“Ah! Don't say you agree with me. When people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.”

“Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.”

“I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”

“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”

“I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there”

“What of Art?
-It is a malady.
--Love?
-An Illusion.
--Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
--You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
--What are you?
-To define is to limit.”

“Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.”

“How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?”

“A flower blossoms for its own joy.”

“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.”

“There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.”

“It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.”

“One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.”

“A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.”

“Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.”

“When the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”

“The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.”

“Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.”

“What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise”

“America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself.”

“They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.”

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.”

“Everything is going to be fine in the end.
If it's not fine it's not the end.”

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”

“Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.”

“Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman”

“Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.”

“Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope.”

“Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.”

“Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good.”

“You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing.”

“Only love can keep anyone alive…”

“Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it.”

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”

“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.”

“Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”

“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”

“The heart was made to be broken.”

“Experience, the name men give to their mistakes.”

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”

“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?”

“Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”

“I can resist everything except temptation.”

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

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

“I have nothing to declare except my genius.”

“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.”

“Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”