Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, the early 1890s saw him become one of the most popular playwrights in London. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in “one of the first celebrity trials”, imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.
As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new “English Renaissance in Art” and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Oscar Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day.
At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote Salome (1891) in French while in Paris but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage.
Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London. At the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) was still being performed in London, Wilde prosecuted the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men.
After two more trials he was convicted and sentenced to two years’ hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison, he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On his release, he left immediately for France, and never returned to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.
Some of the best quotes from Oscar Wilde are listed below.
- “A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.” – Oscar Wilde
- “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” – Oscar Wilde
- “A good friend will always stab you in the front.” – Oscar Wilde
- “A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.” – Oscar Wilde
- “A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.” – Oscar Wilde
- “After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.” – Oscar Wilde
- “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” – Oscar Wilde
- “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” – Oscar Wilde
- “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Every woman is a rebel.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” – Oscar Wilde
- “How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I am not young enough to know everything.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I can resist anything except temptation.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I have nothing to declare except my genius.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” – Oscar Wilde
- “I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.” – Oscar Wilde
- “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” – Oscar Wilde
- “If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.” – Oscar Wilde
- “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” – 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
- “Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Life is too short to learn German.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Nowadays 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.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” – Oscar Wilde
- “One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Some things are more precious because they don’t last long.” – Oscar Wilde
- “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” – Oscar Wilde
- “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” – Oscar Wilde
- “The heart was made to be broken.” – Oscar Wilde
- “The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.” – Oscar Wilde
- “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” – Oscar Wilde
- “The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.” – Oscar Wilde
- “The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.” – Oscar Wilde
- “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” – Oscar Wilde
- “The very essence of romance is uncertainty.” – Oscar Wilde
- “The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.” – Oscar Wilde
- “There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.” – 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 no sin except stupidity.” – Oscar Wilde
- “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” – Oscar Wilde
- “To define is to limit.” – Oscar Wilde
- “To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.” – Oscar Wilde
- “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” – Oscar Wilde
- “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” – Oscar Wilde
- “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” – Oscar Wilde
- “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” – Oscar Wilde
- “We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.” – Oscar Wilde
- “We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.” – Oscar Wilde
- “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.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Who, being loved, is poor?” – Oscar Wilde
- “With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?” – Oscar Wilde
- “Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Yes: I am a dreamer. For 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.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard Some do it with a bitter look Some with a flattering word The coward does it with a kiss The brave man with a sword.” – Oscar Wilde
- “You can never be overdressed or overeducated.” – Oscar Wilde
- “You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.” – Oscar Wilde
- “You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.” – Oscar Wilde
