Quotes by Oscar Wilde

About Oscar Wilde:

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

in every pleasure, cruelty has its place...

Oscar Wilde

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.

Oscar Wilde

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

Oscar Wilde

But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exqui...

Oscar Wilde

Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

Oscar Wilde

It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.

Oscar Wilde

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the...

Oscar Wilde

Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

Oscar Wilde

We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man - ...

Oscar Wilde

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.

Oscar Wilde

I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Oscar Wilde

In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.

Oscar Wilde

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.

Oscar Wilde

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.

Oscar Wilde

The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives.

Oscar Wilde

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

Oscar Wilde

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde

My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what c...

Oscar Wilde

So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degra...

Oscar Wilde

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Oscar Wilde

He wants to enslave you.' 'I shudder at the thought of being free.

Oscar Wilde

Author Bio

  • NameOscar Wilde
  • DescriptionIrish writer and poet
  • AliasesOscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
  • BornOctober 16, 1854
  • DiedNovember 30, 1900
  • CountryUnited Kingdom Of Great Britain And Ireland
  • ProfessionPoet; Playwright; Short Story Writer; Journalist; Children's Writer; Novelist
  • WorksThe Importance Of Being Earnest; The Picture Of Dorian Gray