Oscar Wilde Quotes

Author Image

Oscar Wilde

Profession : Poet

Birth : October 16, 1854

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

Oscar Wilde

I am not young enough to know everything.

Oscar Wilde

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

Oscar Wilde

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

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.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.

Oscar Wilde

London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.

Oscar Wilde

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.

Oscar Wilde

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

Oscar Wilde

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.

Oscar Wilde

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

Oscar Wilde