Oscar Wilde's Quotes

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

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

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

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Genius is born--not paid.

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

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

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

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.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

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

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

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

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

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.

Life is too important to be taken seriously.

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

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

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

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But... it is better to be good than to be ugly.

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

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

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

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

Everything popular is wrong.

An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

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

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

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.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.