60 beautiful quotes by Oscar Wilde. Click any quote to view, download and share it as an image.
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Oscar Wilde
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
“I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.”
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what t...
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.”
“I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”
“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
“She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love...
“The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is she...
“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and r...
“Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.”
“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find be...
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
“Who, being loved, is poor?”
“Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”
“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”
“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one ...
“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to sil...
“Punctuality is the thief of time”
“nothing that is worth knowing can be taught”
“Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must ...
“Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything ...
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
“Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.”
“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”
“I have nothing to declare except my genius.”
“Yet each man kills the thing he lovesBy each let this be heardSome do it with a bitter lookSome with a flattering wordT...
“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
“Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
“All art is quite useless.”
“Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
“Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of...
“If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.”
“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of mode...
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
“Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.”
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History wo...
“I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good int...
“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who kn...
“One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.”
“You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.”
“A flower blossoms for its own joy.”
“You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are th...
“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”
“Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.”