I love quotes by Oscar Wilde. I think the world would be such an amazing place if everyone possessed his type of wit. Here are a few from wikiquote. Click here for more.
- Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
- It is always the unreadable that occurs.
- His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning.
- No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
- Art persists, it timelessly continues.
The Critic as Artist (1891)
- Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.
- Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
- Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes his biography.
- Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
- Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.
- I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
- The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
- It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
- As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
- There is no sin except stupidity.
- To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
- Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They're the only things we can pay.
- I can resist everything except temptation.
- Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.
- Often quoted as: Life is far too important to be taken seriously.
- I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
- My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
- Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
- My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.
- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
- In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
- What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
- Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
- I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not.
- What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.
A Few Maxims For The Instruction Of The Over-Educated (1894)
- First published anonymously in the Saturday Review (17 November 1894) Full text online
- Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
- The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.
- It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
- In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
- Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.
- Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
- To be really mediĉval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.
- Even the disciple has his uses. He stands behind one's throne, and at the moment of one's triumph whispers in one's ear that, after all, one is immortal.
- Those whom the gods love grow young.
