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Oscar Wilde [1854-1900] Irish

Rank: 3
Poet (with poems), Playwright

Aestheticism, Anarchism, Children, Decadents, Didactism, Fantasy, Freemasons, Gothic, Homoerotism, Symbolism, Victorian

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s.

Art, Beauty, Women, Life, Love, Friendship, Men, Marriage, Society, Age, Good, Intelligence, Relationship, Romantic, Science, Best, Courage, Education, Experience, Forgiveness, Funny, Hope, Imagination, Money, Poetry, Sympathy, Time, Truth, Work, Attitude, Death, Dreams, Failure, Family, Fear, Food, Future, God, Great, Happiness, Learning, Music, Nature, Patriotism, Sad, Strength, Success, Teacher, Technology, Travel

Quote	Tags	Rank
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.	Life, Love	1
I can resist everything except temptation.	Funny	102
If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.	Life, Romantic	103
Women are made to be loved, not understood.	Women	104
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.	Best	105
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.	Experience	106
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.	Happiness	107
True friends stab you in the front.	Friendship	108
Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.		109
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.		110
Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.	Forgiveness	111
When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.	Life, Money	112
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.	Dreams	113
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.		114
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.		115
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.		116
Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.		117
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.	Future	118
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.	Friendship, Love, Men, Relationship, Women	119
In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.		120
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.	Education, Time	121
Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.		122
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.	Truth	123
How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.	Relationship	124
I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.	Love, Men, Relationship, Women	125
The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.		126
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.		201
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.		202
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.	Love	203
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.	Work	204
Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.		205
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.	Art, Good, Imagination	206
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.	Art	207
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.	Forgiveness, Time	208
This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.	Funny, Hope	209
A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.	Love	210
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.		211
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.	Experience	212
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.		213
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.		214
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.	Truth	215
A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.		216
There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.		217
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.		218
I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.	God	219
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.		220
Who, being loved, is poor?	Love	221
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.	Women	222
Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.		223
Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.	Courage, Strength	224
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.	Patriotism	225
The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.	Marriage	226
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.	Failure	301
Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.		302
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.	Best, Friendship	303
Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.	Science, Success	304
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.	Great	305
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.		306
Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.		307
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.	Work	308
I have nothing to declare except my genius.		309
There is no sin except stupidity.		310
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.	Intelligence	311
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.		312
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.		313
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.	Age	314
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.	Art	315
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.		316
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.	Marriage	317
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.	Education	318
Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.	Art, Life	319
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.		320
The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.		321
Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.	Society	322
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.	Men, Women	323
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.	Beauty, Sympathy	324
Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.		325
Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.	Science	326
There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about.		401
An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.	Friendship	402
It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.	Hope	403
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.	Art, Beauty	404
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.	Art	405
A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.	Art	406
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.	Beauty	407
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.	Art, Beauty, Nature	408
Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.		409
There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate - not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.	Art	410
I have a dining room done in different shades of white, with white cushions embroidered in yellow silk: the effect is absolutely delightful and the room beautiful.		411
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.	Fear	412
Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.	Men	413
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.	Friendship	414
Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat.		415
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.		416
The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.	Good	417
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.		418
Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.	Women	419
Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.		420
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.	Poetry	421
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.		422
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.		423
Everything popular is wrong.		424
I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.		425
I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.	Food	426
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.		501
Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.	Romantic	502
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.	Art	503
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.	Art	504
No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.		505
When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.		506
Hatred is blind, as well as love.		507
How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.	Marriage	508
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.	Society	509
There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.	Marriage	510
No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.	Age	511
Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.		512
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.		513
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.		514
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.	Family	515
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.		516
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.		517
It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But... it is better to be good than to be ugly.	Good	518
There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.		519
The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.		520
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.		521
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.		522
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.		523
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.	Society	524
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.		525
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.		526
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.		601
One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.	Death	602
Only the shallow know themselves.		603
Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.		604
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.		605
Why was I born with such contemporaries?		606
I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.		607
Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.		608
The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.	Imagination	609
I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.		610
What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.	Art	611
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.		612
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.	Travel	613
The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.		614
As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.		615
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.		616
If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk.	Music	617
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.	Society	618
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.	Learning, Teacher	619
The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.		620
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.		621
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.		622
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.		623
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.	Intelligence	624
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.		625
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.	Money	626
One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.		701
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.	Women	702
You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.	Courage	703
She is a peacock in everything but beauty.	Beauty	704
Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.		705
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.		706
The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.		707
I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.		708
The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.	Age	709
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.	Beauty	710
Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.		711
Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.		712
In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.		713
In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.		714
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.	Science	715
The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.		716
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.	Men	717
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.		718
I am not young enough to know everything.		719
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.	Attitude	720
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.	Life	721
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.	Life	722
If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.	Sympathy	723
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.		724
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.		725
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.		726
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.		801
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.		802
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.		803
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.		804
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.		805
Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.		806
Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.	Beauty	807
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.	Art	808
The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.		809
In married life three is company and two none.		810
When good Americans die they go to Paris.		811
The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.	Technology	812
Charity creates a multitude of sins.		813
Alas, I am dying beyond my means.		814
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.	Poetry	815
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.		816
There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.		817
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.		818
There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.		819
It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.		820
In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.		821
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.		822
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.		823
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.	Romantic	824
I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.		825
Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.		826
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.		901
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.	Intelligence	902
Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.		903
One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.		904
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.		905
In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.		906
All art is quite useless.		907
While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.		908
Writing bores me so.		909
I have never given adoration to any body except myself.		910
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.		911
In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.		912
'The Lady's World' should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.		913
Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.		914
I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.		915
Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.		916
The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.		917
Biography lends to death a new terror.		918
There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose.		919
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.	Sad	920
Those whom the gods love grow young.		921
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.		922
It is always the unreadable that occurs.		923

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