Quotes by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Irish writer

Lived from: 1854 - 1900

Category: Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagIreland

Born: 16 october 1854 Died: 30 november 1900

  • My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
  • All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.
  • When a man has once loved a woman, he will do anything for her, except continue to love her.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • I never saw a man who looked with such a wistful eye upon that little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky.
  • To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
  • On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.
  • Like two doomed ships that pass in storm we had crossed each other's way: but we made no sign, we said no word, we had no word to say.
  • If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
  • 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.
  • They are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.
  • The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.
  • In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
  • Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
  • 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.
  • When I was young I used to think that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old, I know it is.
  • Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
  • We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
  • It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one, behind one's back, that are absolutely and entirely true.
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  • A kiss may ruin a human life.
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  • Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
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  • Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
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  • A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude.
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  • Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
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  • 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.
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  • Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
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  • A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
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  • Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
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  • A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.
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  • Lots of people act well, but few people talk well. This shows that talking is the more difficult of the two.
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  • A poet can survive anything but a misprint.
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  • Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
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  • Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
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  • My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
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  • A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?
    ― Oscar Wilde
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  • A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
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  • America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
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  • And 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.
    ― Oscar Wilde
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  • Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.
    ― Oscar Wilde
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What are the most famous quotes from Oscar Wilde?

The two most famous quotes from Oscar Wilde are:

  • "A kiss may ruin a human life."
  • "Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much."

When did Oscar Wilde live?

Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 and died in the year 1900.