Oscar Wilde Quotes

“Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented.”

“Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important.”

“The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.”

“What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market place of any single thing.”

“Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.”

“Biography lends to death a new terror.”

“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”

“It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.”

“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.”

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”

“Life is too short to learn German”

“LADY STUTFIELD I adore silent men. MRS ALLONBY Oh, Ernest isn't silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don't know. I haven't listened to him for years.”

“One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.”

“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”

“Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.”

“How long could you love a woman who didn't love you, Cecil? A woman who didn't love me? Oh, all my life!”

“And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand.”

“It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work when there is no definite object of any kind. To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing.”

“It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.”

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”

“Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination.”

“When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.”

“My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.”

“JACK That is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury. ALGERNON Then your wife will. You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none. JACK That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years. ALGERNON Yes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time.”