Oscar Wilde Quotes

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

“One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.”

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

“Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.”

“Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless…”

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”

“I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.”

“Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.”

“Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.”

“You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”

“If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.”

“Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.”

“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”

“I drink to separate my body from my soul.”

“When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.”

“No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.”

“In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.”

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.”

“The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.”

“It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”

“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.”

“Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.”

“Arguments are to be avoided, they are always vulgar and often convincing.”

“Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”

“A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.”

“And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.”

“It is better to be beautiful then to be good, but it is better to be good then to be ugly.”

“I am happy in my prison of passion”

“I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.”

“My dear fellow, the truth isn't quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl.”

“Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.”

“The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.”

“Wisdom comes with winters”

“The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away.”

“Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.”

“When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.”

“It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.”

“The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.”

“Lord Illingworth: Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.”

“Oscar Wilde was suing the Marquis of Queensbury in 1895 for libel accusing Wilde of homosexuality

Counsel: Have you ever adored a young man madly?
Wilde: I have never given adoration to anyone except myself.”

“I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.”

“Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”

“My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”

“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.”

“I like talking to a brick wall- it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!”

“He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.”

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.”

“If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.”

“The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”