Oscar Wilde Quotes

“Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”

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

“Let me be dressed as I will, yet flies worms and flowers exceed me still.”

“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 tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”

“Biography lends to death a new terror.”

“Learn to differentiate between ignorance and stupidity.”

“It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.”

“Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.”

“Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.”

“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.”

“I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.”

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

“Tread Lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow.”

“Alas! it is a fearful thingTo feel another's guilt!”

“True love is just like regular love, but with more truth.”

“I live constantly in the fear of not being misunderstood.”

“As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.”

“An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.”

“The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life.”

“All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.”

“Anybody can sympathise with all the sufferings of the pal, nevertheless it involves an extremely great mother nature to sympathise by using a friend's achievement.”

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”

“And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws.”

“Fantastic shadows of birds”

“What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?”

“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.”

“The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.”

“Just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising and lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweler.”

“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”

“Lord AUGUSTUS:(looking around) Time to educate yourself, I suppose. DUMBY: No, time to forget all I have learned. That is much more important.”

“It is personalities not principles that move the age.”

“Credit is a young man's capital.”

“If we're always guided by other people's thoughts, what's the point in having our own?”

“The one advantage of playing with fire...isthat no one ever gets singed. It is the people who don't know how to play with it who get burned up.”

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

“One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.”

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

“The only one you need in your life is that person who shows you he needs you in his.”

“If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.”

“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.”

“Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea.”

“That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.”

“I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in my life.”

“Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things. That is exactly what things were originally made for.”

“The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.”

“The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.”

“It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”

“I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice.”

“You are young. No hungry generations tread you down. The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost”