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

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.

Oscar Wilde

Bad artists always admire each others work.

Oscar Wilde

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Oscar Wilde

I'm too old to know everything

Oscar Wilde

J'avoue que je suis quelque peu décontenancée par ce que vous venez de m'apprendre. Venir au monde, ou en tout cas connaître le jour dans un sac à main, qu'il ait des poignées ou non, me semble témoigner d'un mépris des convenances habituelles...

Oscar Wilde

I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.

Oscar Wilde

People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.

Oscar Wilde

LADY BRACKNELL This noise is extremely unpleasant. It sounds as if he was having an argument. I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.

Oscar Wilde

You should treat the trivial things in life seriously and the serious things in life with a sincere and studied triviality

Oscar Wilde

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth

Oscar Wilde

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

Oscar Wilde

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

Oscar Wilde

The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.

Oscar Wilde

Realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false...

Oscar Wilde

If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.

Oscar Wilde

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.

Oscar Wilde

Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.

Oscar Wilde

I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.

Oscar Wilde

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

Oscar Wilde

Irony is wasted on the stupid

Oscar Wilde

I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours.

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