Oscar Wilde's Quotes

True friends stab you in the front.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

Oscar Wilde

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

Oscar Wilde

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

Oscar Wilde

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

Oscar Wilde

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

Oscar Wilde

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination.

Oscar Wilde

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Oscar Wilde

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

Oscar Wilde

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

Oscar Wilde

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

Oscar Wilde

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

Oscar Wilde

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

Oscar Wilde

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Oscar Wilde

She is a peacock in everything but beauty.

Oscar Wilde

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.

Oscar Wilde

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.

Oscar Wilde

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

Oscar Wilde

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

Oscar Wilde

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

Oscar Wilde

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

Oscar Wilde

Yes, there is a terrible moral in 'Dorian Gray' - a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

Oscar Wilde

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.

Oscar Wilde

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Oscar Wilde

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

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

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

Oscar Wilde

If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

Oscar Wilde

Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

Oscar Wilde

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

Oscar Wilde

Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Oscar Wilde

Who, being loved, is poor?

Oscar Wilde

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

Oscar Wilde

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

Oscar Wilde

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

Oscar Wilde

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Oscar Wilde

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

Oscar Wilde

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

Oscar Wilde

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

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

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.

Oscar Wilde