Quotes by Oscar Wilde

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

I can resist everything except temptation.

Be yourself! Everyone else is already taken.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

To regret one's own experience is to arrest one's own development.

Men always want to be a woman's first love. What women like is to be a man's last romance.

Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Life is far too important to be taken seriously.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

I have the simplest tastes: I am always satisfied with the best.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about.

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and by far the best ending for one.

People are either charming or tedious.

More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

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

One can survive everything nowadays except death.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

Wisdom comes with winters.

If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

Women are made to be loved, not understood.