Oscar Wilde: Quotes about people

Oscar Wilde was Irish writer and poet. Explore interesting quotes on people.

Oscar Wilde: 1624 quotes1011 likes

“My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.”

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan

Cecil Graham, Act III
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)

“There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

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

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

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.”

Letter from Paris (May 1900)

“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.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“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.”

“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.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“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.”

Oscar Wilde book De Profundis

Source: De Profundis

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

“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.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“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.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

“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.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

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

Source: The Critic as Artist

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

Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband

Lord Goring, Act III.
Variant: The only possible society is oneself.
Source: An Ideal Husband (1895)

“Most people are boring and stupid.”

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.

“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 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

“I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Selected Stories

“Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which is never advisable.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest