Famous Oscar Wilde quotes

We lose our chances, we lose our figures, we even lose our characters; but we must never lose our tempers. That is our duty to our neighbor...but sometimes we mislay it, don't we?
- 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 put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
- Oscar Wilde

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

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. - Oscar Wilde
- 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

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
- Oscar Wilde

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
- Oscar Wilde

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
- 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

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
- Oscar Wilde

Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.
- Oscar Wilde

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
- Oscar Wilde

Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the center of the city.
- Oscar Wilde

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

Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success.
- Oscar Wilde

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
- Oscar Wilde

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
- 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

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
- 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

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
- Oscar Wilde

No good deed goes unpunished.
- Oscar Wilde

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
- Oscar Wilde

The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
- Oscar Wilde

The man who says his wife can’t take a joke, forgets that she took him.
- Oscar Wilde

Dammit Sir, it’s your duty to get married. You can’t always be living for pleasure!
- Oscar Wilde

I am not young enough to know everything.
- Oscar Wilde

All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.
- Oscar Wilde

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.
- Oscar Wilde

True friends stab you in the front.
- Oscar Wilde

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
- Oscar Wilde

I can resist everything except temptation.
- Oscar Wilde

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
- Oscar Wilde

Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.
- 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

All great ideas are dangerous.
- Oscar Wilde

The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
- Oscar Wilde

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
- Oscar Wilde

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
- 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

The best way to enjoy your job is to imagine yourself without one.
- 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