Quotes of the day- Oscar Wilde:
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie
Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) was an Irish writer
and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he
became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s.
Today he is remembered for his epigrams and plays, and the circumstances
of his imprisonment which was followed by his early death.
[A cynic is] A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
A Dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
A map of thw world that doesn't include Utopia isn't worth looking at.
A pessimist is one who when he has the choice of two evils chooses both.
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
A well tied tie is the first serious step in life.
A woman begins by resisting a man's advances, and ends by blocking his retreat.
A woman's face is her work of fiction.
A work of art is useless. So is a flower.
All art is quite useless.
All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success.
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.
Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
Bad artists always admire each other's work.
Be moderate in all things, including moderation.
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
Biography lends to death a new terror.
But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul in its progress from darkness to darkness.
By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.
Caricature is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius.
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.
Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative.
Democracy simply means the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labour.
Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Every great man has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Fathers should neither be seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy.
Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life.
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
I am not young enough to know everything.
I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.
I am tired of my expedition into the dim, the zero abyss of facts.
I can stand brute force but brute reason is quite unbearable.
I couldn't help it. I can resist everything except temptation.
I don't like principles. I prefer prejudices.
I have never come across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
I like people better than principles, and I like people with no principles better than anything else in the world.
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.
I suppose that when a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her, except continue to love her.
I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.
If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.
If your morals make you dreary, depend on it: they are wrong.
Imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press.
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants. The other is getting it.
Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.
It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.
It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.
It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.
It is only the superficial who do not judge by appearances.
It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.
It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
It's not what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts.
Life is one fool thing after another where as love is two fool things after each other.
Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell the truth.
Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious; both are disappointed.
Men represent the triumph of mind over morals, whereas women represent the triumph of matter over mind.
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Morality did not help me. I was one of those who were made for exceptions, not for laws.
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.
Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.
Never buy a thing you don't want merely because it is dear.
Never give a woman advice: one should never give a woman anything she can't wear in the evening.
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist.
No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
None of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it's too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
One should always be a little improbable.
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
One should never make one's debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age.
One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything.
One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Only the shallow know themselves.
Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.
Perhaps, after all, America has never been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.
Philanthropy seems to me to have become simply the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures.
Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.
Punctuality is the thief of time.
Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.
Realism is only a background.
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes; that is always a sign of despair in a woman.
Skepticism is the beginning of Faith.
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.
Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
The basis for every scandal is an immoral certainty.
The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
The London season is entirely matrimonial; people are either hunting for husbands or hiding from them.
The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a necessity.
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk.
The only thing that men and women have in common, is that they both prefer the company of men.
The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
[T]he only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
[T]he people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty and their fidelity, I call their lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what constancy is to the intellect- simply a confession of failure.
The play was a great success but the audience was a total failure.
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly deceived.
The Soul is born old, but it grows young; that is the comedy of life. The Body is born young and grows old; that is life's tragedy.
The world was my oyster, but I used the wrong fork.
The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity.
The youth of America is their oldest tradition.
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labour.
There are two kinds of people who are really fascinating- people who know absolutely everything and people who know absolutely nothing.
There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.
There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
There is no sin except stupidity.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is something no married man knows anything about.
There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
To be really medieval, one should have no body. To be really modern, one should have no soul. To be really Greek, one should have no clothes.
To get back one's youth one merely has to repeat one's follies.
To get back to my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is the proper occupation of the historian.
To have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact, talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you.
To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development.
True friends stab you in the front.
Truth is never pure and rarely simple. Modern life would be tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
Vulgarity is the conduct of others.
We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.
We live in a age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
When Liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood, it is hard to shake hands with her.
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is always from the noblest motive.
Who, being loved, is poor?
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the attractiveness of others.
With an evening coat and a white tie, even a stockbroker can gain a reputation for being civilized.
Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat.
Women are made to be loved, not understood.
Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.
Women give to men the very gold of their lives. Possibly; but they invariably want it back in such very small change.
Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.
Women inspire men to great undertakings, and then distract us from carrying them out.
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
Women spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever.
Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us and are always bothering us to do something for them.
Work is the curse of the drinking class.
Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.
You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
Young men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and cannot.
Categories: Oscar Wilde, Quotes of the day
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