Oscar Wilde Quotes

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

“You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.”

“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.”

“Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.”

“A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.”

“We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”

“The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.”

“I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.”

“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.”

“I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.”

“Never met such a Gorgon… I don't really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair.”

“The great events of the world take place in the brain…”

“Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.

Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.”

“[E]verybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.”

“What fire does not destroy, it hardens”

“To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.”

“I think it's very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person.”

“Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?”

“Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things.
That is exactly what things were originally made for.”

“Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.”

“It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind. -Algernon”

“And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal”

“Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a
sacrament that should be taken kneeling.”

“When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”

“She lives the poetry she cannot write.”

“I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”

“Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.”

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”

“With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.”

“Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never happened or couldn't possibly have happened.”

“And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry
the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.”

“There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.”

“ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl… I have ever met since… I met you.”

“I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.”

“I analyzed you, though you did not adore me.”

“To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”

“You are what you read”

“Yes, very sensible… People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.”

“Any place you love is the world to you.”

“Now produce your explanation and pray make it improbable.”

“To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.”

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.”

“We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.”

“Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.”

“I know. In fact, I am never wrong.”

“The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”

“The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.”

“Truth is independent of facts always.”

“I must say… that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.”

“Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.”