Oscar Wilde Quotes page 5 812 Quotes on Love, Forgiveness, Rebellion, and Embracing Your Unique Voice

“Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.”

Lady Bracknell, Act III
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

“People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.”

Miss Prism, Act II
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.”

Letter from Paris (May 1900)

“It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world”

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

“There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde book De Profundis

Source: De Profundis

“It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.”

“She… can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”

“Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.”

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

“I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.”

“If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.”

“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.”

“I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.”

“I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister.
Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.”

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

“A kiss may ruin a human life”

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

“The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.”

“Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.”

Source: Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man

“Man is many things, but he is not rational.”

“When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“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 book The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Pt. I, st. 7.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)
Source: The Ballad Of Reading Gaol

“I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.”

“One should always be a little improbable.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

Oscar Wilde book Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young

Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894)

“I beg your pardon I didn't recognise you - I've changed a lot.”

“My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly, madly!

You didn't know it then-you know it now.”

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan

Source: Lady Windermere's Fan

“Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.”

“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde book De Profundis

Source: De Profundis

“Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.”

“Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris.”

“The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.”