Dramatist · Irish · 1854 – 1900 · 199 quotes
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
Oscar Wilde
Dramatist · Irish · 1854 – 1900
Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.
No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.
The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.
In married life three is company and two none.
There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.
Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
Women are made to be loved, not understood.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Life is too important to be taken seriously.
Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.
