In this post, we’ll explore Oscar Wilde quotes, an Irish writer known for his sharp wit, humor, and clever views on life.
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 and studied at top schools, where he became known for his love of art and beauty. He quickly rose to fame as a writer and speaker due to his quick thinking and unique style.
Wilde’s best-known works include The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which are loved for their humor and clever take on society.
Let’s look at some of the best Oscar Wilde quotes about life, art, people and more.
Famous Oscar Wilde Quotes
1. “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
2. “Some things are too important to be taken seriously.”
3. “Punctuality is the thief of time.”
4. “No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”
5. “Hearts are made to be broken.”
6. “You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
7. “To define is to limit.”
8. “Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
9. “A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.”
10. “The one charm about the past is that it is the past.”
Best Oscar Wilde Quotes
1. “A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
2. “A flower blossoms for its own joy.”
3. “Man is many things, but he is not rational.”
4. “Everything in moderation, including moderation.”
5. “The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”
6. “Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.”
7. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”
8. “I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.”
9. “A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.”
10. “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Oscar Wilde Quotes on Life
1. “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.”
2. “I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”
3. “Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.”
4. “Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”
5. “Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.”
6. “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.”
7. “If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.”
8. “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
Oscar Wilde Quotes on Love
1. “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
2 “She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.”
3. “It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.”
4. “I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”
5. “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.”
6. “Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”
7. “Who, being loved, is poor?”
8. “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.”
9. “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”
10. “One should always be in love. That’s the reason one should never marry.”
11. “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.”
12. “I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.”
13. “There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.”
Oscar Wilde Quotes on Identity
1. “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
2. “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.”
3. “You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
4. “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
5. “I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
6. “I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”
7. “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
Oscar Wilde Quotes on People
1. “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
2. “When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.”
3. “One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.”
4. “Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.”
5. “There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”
6. 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.”
7. “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”
8. “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
9. “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
Oscar Wilde Quotes on Friendship
1. “One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends.”
2. “A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
3. “Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.”
4. “He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.”
5. “Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.”
6. “I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.”
7. “Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.”
8. “Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.”
Oscar Wilde Quotes on Art
1. “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
2. “Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
3. “Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”
4. “The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. ”
5. “All art is quite useless.”
Oscar Wilde Quotes on Books & Writing
1. “I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
2. “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
3. “With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”
4. “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
5. “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
6. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
7. “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 Quotes on Women & Marriage
1. “Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”
2. “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
3. “She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.”
4. “Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women…merely adored.”
5. “She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.”
6. “I don’t like compliments, and I don’t see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn’t mean.”
7. “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.”
8. “Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.”
9. “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.”
10. “We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.”
11. “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”
12. “When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”
13. “Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”
14. “Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”
15. “A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.”
Inspirational Oscar Wilde Quotes
1. “We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
2. “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
3. “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
4. “Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
5. “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.”
6. “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
7. “They’ve promised that dreams can come true – but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.”
8. “There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.”
9. “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
10. “They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.”
11. “Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.”
12. “The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.”
Short Oscar Wilde Quotes
1. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
2. “You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.”
3. “The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.”
4. “I never change, except in my affections.”
5. “I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.”
6. “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
7. “There is no sin except stupidity.”
8. “We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”
9. “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
10. “Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
11. “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”
12. “Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
13. “I am not young enough to know everything.”
14. “The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
15. “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
16. “Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative.”
Funny Oscar Wilde Quotes
1. “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”
2. “I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”
3. “Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.”
4. “One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.”
5. “Life is too short to learn German.”
6. “Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.”
7. “I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.”
8. “I can resist anything except temptation.”
Oscar Wilde quotes mainly remind us to see the beauty in life, laugh at its absurdities, and embrace our individuality.
Which of these Oscar Wilde quotes is your favorite?
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