One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

Oscar Wilde

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Oscar Wilde

Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.

Oscar Wilde

There is a great deal to be said in favor of reading a novel backwards.

Oscar Wilde

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

Oscar Wilde

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

Oscar Wilde

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Oscar Wilde

People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it’s impossible to count them accurately.

Oscar Wilde

When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.

Oscar Wilde

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

Oscar Wilde

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Oscar Wilde

The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.

Oscar Wilde

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.

Oscar Wilde

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

Oscar Wilde

No good deed goes unpunished.

Oscar Wilde

Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole!

Oscar Wilde

We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.

Oscar Wilde

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

Oscar Wilde

My great mistake, the fault for which I can’t forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.

Oscar Wilde

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

Oscar Wilde

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Oscar Wilde

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

Oscar Wilde

I can resist everything except temptation.

Oscar Wilde

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

Oscar Wilde

One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

Oscar Wilde

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Oscar Wilde

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.

Oscar Wilde

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

Oscar Wilde

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

Oscar Wilde

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Oscar Wilde

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

Oscar Wilde

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

Oscar Wilde

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

Oscar Wilde

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

Oscar Wilde

A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.

Oscar Wilde

The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.

Oscar Wilde

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

Oscar Wilde

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Oscar Wilde

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Oscar Wilde

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

Oscar Wilde

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Oscar Wilde

I am so clever that sometimes don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

Oscar Wilde

We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

Oscar Wilde

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Oscar Wilde

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Oscar Wilde

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Oscar Wilde

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

Oscar Wilde

Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

Oscar Wilde

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

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

I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.

Oscar Wilde

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.

Oscar Wilde

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.

Oscar Wilde

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Oscar Wilde

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

Oscar Wilde

Everything popular is wrong.

Oscar Wilde

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.

Oscar Wilde