Oscar Wilde Quotes

“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

“When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.”

“Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance”

“The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.”

“I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.”

“Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.”

“Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.”

“I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful”

“Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art.”

“What is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means?”

“This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.”

“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.”

“His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.”

“When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.”

“She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.”

“With an evening coat and a white tie, anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilized”

“There is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty.”

“A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.”

“It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.”

“We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone.”

“Duty is what one expects from others.”

“Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”

“The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.”

“If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”