Oscar Wilde Quotes | GloryQuotes

Oscar Wilde Quotes About Life

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

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

Oscar Wilde Quotes About Women

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.

I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.

Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.

More Quotes by Oscar Wilde

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

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

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

If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

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

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

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

There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

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

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

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

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

Browse 199 quotes attributed to Oscar Wilde, listed in the source data as a Irish Dramatist, organized around themes such as Life, Women, Love. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.