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Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.
OSCAR WILDE, A Woman of No Importance
Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
OSCAR WILDE, An Ideal Husband
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.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
OSCAR WILDE, Lady Windermere's Fan
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
OSCAR WILDE, The Happy Prince
That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.
OSCAR WILDE, "Art and the Handicraftsman"
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
OSCAR WILDE, The Critic as Artist
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune ... to lose both seems like carelessness.
OSCAR WILDE, The Importance of Being Earnest
Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious.
OSCAR WILDE, attributed, In Victorian Days and Other Papers
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
OSCAR WILDE, The Decay of Lying
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
OSCAR WILDE, "The Children of the Poets," Pall Mall Gazette, Oct. 14, 1886
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.
OSCAR WILDE, letter from Paris, May 1900
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
OSCAR WILDE, The Portrait of Mr. W. H.
I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
OSCAR WILDE, The Importance of Being Earnest
The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.
It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
OSCAR WILDE, De Profundis
Only the shallow know themselves.
OSCAR WILDE, Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the Young
Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
To be great is to be misunderstood.
OSCAR WILDE, letter to James McNeill Whistler, Feb. 23, 1885
Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
OSCAR WILDE, attributed, The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde
The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
OSCAR WILDE, The Critic as Artist
It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.
OSCAR WILDE, The Portrait of Mr. W. H.
The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous.
OSCAR WILDE, The Importance of Being Earnest
A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.
OSCAR WILDE, De Profundis
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
OSCAR WILDE, The Canterville Ghost
My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
OSCAR WILDE, Lady Windermere's Fan
They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.
OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
My dear fellow, the truth isn't quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl.
OSCAR WILDE, The Importance of Being Earnest
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
OSCAR WILDE, The Critic as Artist
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
OSCAR WILDE, attributed, Oscar Wilde: An Idler's Impression
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.
OSCAR WILDE, A Woman of No Importance
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
OSCAR WILDE, attributed, Hating America: A History
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.
OSCAR WILDE, De Profundis
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
OSCAR WILDE, The Nightingale and the Rose
What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
OSCAR WILDE, An Ideal Husband
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose
He hasn't a single redeeming vice.
OSCAR WILDE, Epigrams: An Anthology
The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade.
OSCAR WILDE, "Symphony in Yellow"
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
OSCAR WILDE, Lady Windermere's Fan
To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.
OSCAR WILDE, Pall Mall Gazette, February 15, 1889
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
"Did you go in for games?" I asked.
"No," Oscar replied smiling, "I never liked to kick or be kicked."
OSCAR WILDE, Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
OSCAR WILDE, The Decay of Lying
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Red roses are at her feet,
(Roses are red in her red-gold hair)
And O where her bosom and girdle meet
Red roses are hidden there.
OSCAR WILDE, "The Dole of the King's Daughter"
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.
OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I never saw sad men who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
We prisoners called the sky.
OSCAR WILDE, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Private property ... has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim.
OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
OSCAR WILDE, The Happy Prince and Other Stories
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
OSCAR WILDE, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
The English country gentleman galloping after a fox -- the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
OSCAR WILDE,A Woman of No Importance
There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
OSCAR WILDE, "The Decay of Lying", The Works of Oscar Wilde
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