It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated. – Oscar Wilde The Importance of being Earnest, Algernon, Act 2.
Oh, why will parents always appear at the wrong time? Some extraordinary mistake in nature, I suppose. – Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband, Lord Goring, Act 3.
The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule. – Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance, Lord Illingworth, Act 3.
Living at the mercy of a woman who has neither mercy nor pity in her, a woman whom it is an infamy to meet, a degradation to know, a vile woman, a woman who comes between husband and wife! – Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lady Windermere, Act 3.
It is always an advantage not to have received a sound commercial education, and what I learned in the playing fields at Eton has been quite as useful to me as anything I was taught at Cambridge. – Oscar Wilde The Portrait of Mr. W. H.
The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. – Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized. – Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband, Mrs. Cheveley to Lord Goring, Act 3.
‘What is a sensitive person?’ said the Cracker to the Roman Candle. ‘A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people’s toes,’ answered the Roman Candle. – Oscar Wilde The Remarkable Rocket
The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable. – Oscar Wilde The Importance of being Earnest, Cecily, Act 2.
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. – Oscar Wilde The Decay of Lying
A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. – Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance, Lord Illingworth, Act 3.
My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people’s. – Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere’s Fan, Cecil Graham, Act 3.
In married life affection comes when people thoroughly dislike each other. – Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband, Lord Goring, Act 3.
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishments on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people – that is all! – Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance, Lord Illingworth, Act 3.
But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. – Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure. – Oscar Wilde Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young
A man who is much talked about is always very attractive. One feels there must be something in him, after all. – Oscar Wilde The Importance of being Earnest, Cecily, Act 2.
No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex. – Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband, Lord Cavasham, Act 3.
I quite admit that modern novels have many good points. All I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite unreadable. – Oscar Wilde The Decay of Lying
It is proper that limitations should be placed on action. It is not proper that limitations should be placed on art. To art belongs all things that are and things that are not, and even the editor of a London paper has no right to restrain the freedom of art in the selection of subject-matter. – Oscar Wilde Art and Morality: A Defence of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray.’
To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one out from so much. – Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance, Lady Hunstanton, Act 3.
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 Lady Windermere’s Fan, Cecil Graham, Act 3.
There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. – Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man Under Socialism