Oscar Wilde Quotes

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
Oscar Wilde

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
Oscar Wilde

Life is too important to be taken seriously.
Oscar Wilde

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Oscar Wilde

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Oscar Wilde

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Oscar Wilde

Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar Wilde

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Oscar Wilde

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
Oscar Wilde

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
Oscar Wilde

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Oscar Wilde

Mrs. Allonby: No man does. That is his.
Oscar Wilde

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.
Oscar Wilde

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
Oscar Wilde

My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.
Oscar Wilde

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

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
Oscar Wilde

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.
Oscar Wilde

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
Oscar Wilde

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
Oscar Wilde

Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.
Oscar Wilde

Nothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
Oscar Wilde

Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.
Oscar Wilde

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.
Oscar Wilde

Of course America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
Oscar Wilde

Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris.
Oscar Wilde

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
Oscar Wilde

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Oscar Wilde

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
Oscar Wilde

One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
Oscar Wilde

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
Oscar Wilde

Only the shallow know themselves.
Oscar Wilde

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
Oscar Wilde

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.
Oscar Wilde

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
Oscar Wilde

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
Oscar Wilde

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
Oscar Wilde

Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.
Oscar Wilde

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.
Oscar Wilde

Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.
Oscar Wilde

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
Oscar Wilde

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
Oscar Wilde

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
Oscar Wilde

Some of these people need ten years of therapy -ten sentences of mine do not equal ten years of therapy.
Oscar Wilde

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.
Oscar Wilde

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar Wilde

The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Oscar Wilde

The English country gentleman galloping after a fox - The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
Oscar Wilde

The General was essentially a man of peace, except of course in his domestic affairs.
Oscar Wilde

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
Oscar Wilde

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
Oscar Wilde

The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.
Oscar Wilde

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.
Oscar Wilde

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
Oscar Wilde

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
Oscar Wilde

The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
Oscar Wilde

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.
Oscar Wilde

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
Oscar Wilde

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
Oscar Wilde

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Oscar Wilde

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Oscar Wilde

The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.
Oscar Wilde

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