Oscar Wilde Quotes

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Oscar Wilde

Profession : Poet

Birth : October 16, 1854

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

Oscar Wilde

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

Oscar Wilde

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

Oscar Wilde

In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.

Oscar Wilde

If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.

Oscar Wilde

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.

Oscar Wilde

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

Writing bores me so.

Oscar Wilde

I have never given adoration to any body except myself.

Oscar Wilde

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.

Oscar Wilde

Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.

Oscar Wilde

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

Oscar Wilde