Oscar Wilde Quotes
-
Lord Caversham: No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex.Lord Goring: Quite so. And we men are so self-sacrificing that we never use it, do we, father?
-
There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.
-
If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself - a rare type in our time ... you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days. But Oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next to a man who has spent his life in trying to educate others! What a dreadful experience that is!
-
Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties.
-
You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all.
-
People who love only once in their lives are. . . shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.
-
It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.
-
It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country.
-
Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.
-
As a rule, I think they are quite impossible. Geniuses talk so much, don't they? Such a bad habit! And they are always thinking about themselves, when I want them to be thinking about me.
-
I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
-
Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons.
-
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
-
With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.
-
People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.
-
I won't belong to a club that accepts me as a member.
-
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 gods bestowed on Max the gift of perpetual old age.
-
I didn't have a life until I went up onstage.
-
This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.
-
The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.
-
Conscience makes egotists of us all.
-
Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.
-
He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression...