Oscar Wilde

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.

Oscar Wilde

It is awfully hard work doing nothing.

Oscar Wilde

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

Oscar Wilde

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde

When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.

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

All great ideas are dangerous.

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

I work hard at being idle.

Oscar Wilde

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

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

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

Oscar Wilde

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.

Oscar Wilde

We live in the age of the over-worked, and under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.

Oscar Wilde

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.

Oscar Wilde

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

Oscar Wilde

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.

Oscar Wilde

I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do the day after.

Oscar Wilde

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Oscar Wilde

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

Oscar Wilde

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

I am not young enough to know everything.

Oscar Wilde

Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.

Oscar Wilde

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Oscar Wilde

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.

Oscar Wilde

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

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

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

Oscar Wilde

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Oscar Wilde

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Oscar Wilde

Art never expresses anything but itself.

Oscar Wilde

Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn’t so, life wouldn’t be worth living.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Oscar Wilde

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Oscar Wilde

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

Oscar Wilde

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Oscar Wilde

Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.

Oscar Wilde

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

Oscar Wilde

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.

Oscar Wilde

Outcasts always mourn.

Oscar Wilde

I can resist everything except temptation.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

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

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

Do you really think … that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not — there is no weakness in that.

Oscar Wilde

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Oscar Wilde

Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.

Oscar Wilde

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Oscar Wilde

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But … it is better to be good than to be ugly.

Oscar Wilde

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

Oscar Wilde

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Oscar Wilde

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

Oscar Wilde

The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Oscar Wilde

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

Oscar Wilde

The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women … merely adored.

Oscar Wilde

All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.

Oscar Wilde

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

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

Oscar Wilde

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Oscar Wilde

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

Oscar Wilde

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Oscar Wilde

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.

Oscar Wilde

True friends stab you in the front.

Oscar Wilde

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

Oscar Wilde