Oscar Wilde Quotes

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

“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.

All art is quite useless.”

“Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.”

“There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.”

“Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.”

“You are a sceptic." "Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith." "What are you?" "To define is to limit.”

“Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.”

“In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you”

“He hadn’t a single redeeming vice.”

“Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.”

“Come, dear, [Gwendolen rises] we have already missed five, if not six, trains. To miss any more might expose us to comment on the platform.”

“It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!”

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize”

“Never mind what I say. I am always saying what I shouldn't say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.”

“Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar”

“My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.”

“Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They're the only things we can pay.”

“sorrow… is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of
love touches it”

“If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.”

“The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

“We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.”

“How pale the Princess is! Never have I seen her so pale. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver.”

“I really don't see what is so romantic about proposing. One may be accepted - one usually is, I believe - and then the excitement is ended. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

“Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving invitations.”

“Pleasures may turn a heart to stone, riches may make it callous, but sorrows cannot break it. Hearts live by being wounded.”

“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.”

“Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.”

“The supreme vice is shallowness.”

“Duty is what one expects from others.”

“If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.”

“I was wrong. God's law is only Love.”

“To look wise is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.”

“You are Beautiful when you are happy”

“She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.”

“Friendship… is not something you learn in school, but if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship you really haven't learned anything.”

“I hope to-morrow will be a fine day, Lane.
It never is, sir.
Lane, you're a perfect pessimist.
I do my best to give satisfaction, sir.”

“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.”

“I want to make Romeo jealous! I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.”

“I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.”

“Jack: Actually, I was found.
Lady Bracknell: Found?
Jack: Uh, yes, I was in… a handbag.
Lady Bracknell: A handbag?
Jack: Yes, it was…
[makes gestures]
Jack: an ordinary handbag.”

“Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories.”

“It was you I thought of all the time, I gave to them the love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs.”

“I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.”

“The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us.”

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.”

“It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.”

“but the bravest man among us is afraid of himself”

“Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life… I have put only my talent into my works.”

“I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.”

“Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities”