Famous Quotes from ...

Oscar Wilde

  • If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Life is too important to be taken seriously.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • 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.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • A kiss may ruin a human life.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • When I was young, I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old, I know it is... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • One's real life is often the life that one does not lead... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly deceived... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one's own perfection, to make one's every dream a reality.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • And he goes through life, his mouth open, and his mind closed... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The secret of life is in art.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Put your talent into your work, but your genius into your life... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are very difficult to interpret (understand). Great passion are for the great of souls. Great events can only be seen by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever written in my life. Strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • In married life three is company and two none.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The American father is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim / objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming pe... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • I love acting. It is so much more real than life.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • He must have a truly romantic nature, for he weeps when there is nothing at all to weep about.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious; both are disappointed.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • One should never trust a woman who tells her real age. If she tells that, she'll tell anything.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • For he who lives more lives than one - More deaths than one must die... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The Governor was strong upon/ The Regulations Act:/ The Doctor said that Death was but/ A scientific fact:/ And twice a day the Chaplain called,/ And left a little tract.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. The Picture of Dorian Gray... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to lifethat nothing else can bring.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The truth is rarely pure and never simple.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • I do not approve of anything which tampers with natural ignorance... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a mans last romance.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognize them. They look so thoroughly unhappy.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • 35 is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Thirty five is a very attractive age; London society is full of women who have of their own free choice remained thirty-five for years.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Married men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualification... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the color, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • To get into the best society nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Hear no evil, speak no evil - and you'll never be invited to a party... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • I live in fear of not being misunderstood... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • I was disappointed in Niagara - most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • And the wild regrets and the bloody sweats None knew so well as I: That he who lives more lives than one, More deaths than one shall die.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • You know what a woman's curiosity is... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The world has been made by fools that men should live in it... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • People who love only once in their lives are. . . shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The value of an idea has nothing to do with the success of the man who expresses it... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • And now, I am dying beyond my means. [Sipping champagne on his deathbed]... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The only way a woman can ever reform her husband is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic - a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • Don't give a woman advice: one should never give a woman anything she can't wear in the evening... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with any woman so long as he doesn't love her... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • I don't want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that, and I never pay mine.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • 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 to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.... Oscar Wilde {view}
  • [Throughout the film, Patrick, who prefers to be called Kitten, dismisses all politics as] serious, serious, serious. ... I love talking about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.... Oscar Wilde {view}