Oscar Wilde: Trending quotes

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Oscar Wilde: 1624 quotes1011 likes

“One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.”

“Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.

It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

“I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. 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 The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

“A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.”

Oscar Wilde book The Soul of Man under Socialism

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

“When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

“I don't want to earn my living, I want to live.”

“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”

Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband

Source: An Ideal Husband

“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.”

“She is a peacock in everything but beauty!”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable”

Source: The Critic as Artist

“America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.”

Variant: America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

“Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

“Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true.”

“But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Algernon, Act I.
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Context: 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.

“Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is.”