Quotes by Oscar Wilde

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

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

Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.

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

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

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

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.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

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

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

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

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

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

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

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

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

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.

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

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

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

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

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

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

Life is far too important to be taken seriously.

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

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

One can survive everything nowadays except death.

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.

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.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

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

People are either charming or tedious.

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

I can resist everything except temptation.

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

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

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

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