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

The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice.

Oscar Wilde

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.

Oscar Wilde

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

Oscar Wilde

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

Oscar Wilde

They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.

Oscar Wilde

Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray tha...

Oscar Wilde

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

Oscar Wilde

A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab ...

Oscar Wilde

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.

Oscar Wilde

To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

Oscar Wilde

Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worse habits.

Oscar Wilde

Natürlich ist die Ehe nur Gewohnheit. Eine schlechte sogar. Aber man bedauert sogar den Verlust der schlechten Gewohnheit. Kann sein, dass man sie sogar am meisten bedauert.

Oscar Wilde

Women are wonderfully practical,' murmured Lord Henry, 'much more practical than we are. In situations of that kind we often forget to say anything about marriage, and they always remind us.

Oscar Wilde

Besides, every experience is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an experience.

Oscar Wilde

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.

Oscar Wilde

Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its lo...

Oscar Wilde

Art, like Nature, has her monsters

Oscar Wilde

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of ste...

Oscar Wilde

tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play�...

Oscar Wilde

Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather an other chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! On...

Oscar Wilde

Life has always poppies in her hands.

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