127 Memorable Oscar Wilde Quotes on Love, Beauty and Art

His extravagant lifestyle drew as much attention as his work with flamboyant style and an infamous imprisonment he will forever be remembered for. Oscar Wilde was one of London’s most popular playwrights with considerable contribution towards English literature, and simple creation of inspiring words surrounding, love, beauty and art.

Born in Ireland in 1854, Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. His creativity was evident throughout his upbringing as impressed peers and teachers with humorous and inventive stories during school.  At university, Wilde read traditional Greats and was quickly established as an exceptional classicist at both Trinity College in Dublin and at Oxford.

Through the influence of his tutors, Wilde was drawn to the emerging philosophy of aestheticism. He moved to London after his studies and immersed himself into fashionable culture and social circles. Wilde tried various literary styles, starting with poetry and journalism. He progressed to dialogues and essays towards the end of the 1890’s and released his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Wilde’s first play Salome, was written in 1891 although it was refused a licence for England due to absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects. The four society comedies he wrote soon after Salome made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.

He wrote nine plays throughout his life, along with his book, numerous poems, short stories and essays. His most famous works include the poem The Ballad of the Reading Gaol, the play The Importance of Being Earnest and comic masterpiece Lady Windermere’s Fan.

Wilde’s personal life was tried in the public when he was imprisoned for a homosexual relationship. He sadly spent his final years impoverished and in exile, before dying in 1900 of meningitis. It brought a tragic end for the artist who believed that style in life as well as in art was of utmost importance.

With undeniable passion towards love, beauty and art, Wilde’s work was driven by the values and experiences he held with him until his final breath. His words will forever remain in the hearts of not only those who followed his work, but anyone who’s in need of a short, sharp lesson surrounding what matters most.

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

Oscar Wilde

2. Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

Oscar Wilde

3. It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But… it is better to be good than to be ugly.

Oscar Wilde

4. True friends stab you in the front.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

8. Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

Oscar Wilde

9. The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.

Oscar Wilde

10. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Oscar Wilde

11. No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

13. One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Oscar Wilde

14. I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

Oscar Wilde

15. Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Oscar Wilde

16. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Oscar Wilde

17. A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

Oscar Wilde

18. Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.

Oscar Wilde

19. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

Oscar Wilde

20. Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

Oscar Wilde

21. The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

Oscar Wilde

22. I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.

Oscar Wilde

23. Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

Oscar Wilde

24. 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

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

Oscar Wilde

26. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde

27. You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

Oscar Wilde

28. The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Oscar Wilde

29. 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.

Oscar Wilde

30. The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

32. The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

34. I have never given adoration to any body except myself.

Oscar Wilde

35. Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.

Oscar Wilde

36. 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

37. There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

Oscar Wilde

38. A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Oscar Wilde

39. I have nothing to declare except my genius.

Oscar Wilde

40. The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

Oscar Wilde

41. All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

43. One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

Oscar Wilde

44. There is no sin except stupidity.

Oscar Wilde

45. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Oscar Wilde

46. A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.

Oscar Wilde

47. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

Oscar Wilde

48. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Oscar Wilde

49. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

52. Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Oscar Wilde

53. Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.

Oscar Wilde

54. Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde

55. Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

Oscar Wilde

56. I can resist anything except temptation.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

58. Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

Oscar Wilde

59. One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

Oscar Wilde

60. Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

Oscar Wilde

61. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Oscar Wilde

62. Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

Oscar Wilde

63. 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

64. I can resist everything except temptation.

Oscar Wilde

65. To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Oscar Wilde

66. To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.

Oscar Wilde

67. Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.

Oscar Wilde

68. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Oscar Wilde

69. I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

Oscar Wilde

70. I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Oscar Wilde

71. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us

Oscar Wilde

72. Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.

Oscar Wilde

73. Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

Oscar Wilde

74. When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

Oscar Wilde

75. There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose.

Oscar Wilde

76. You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.

Oscar Wilde

77. 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

78. There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

80. If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.

Oscar Wilde

81. 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

82. What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

84. He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

Oscar Wilde

85. Hearts are made to be broken.

Oscar Wilde

86. Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.

Oscar Wilde

87. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Oscar Wilde

88. I am not young enough to know everything.

Oscar Wilde

89. Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

Oscar Wilde

90. I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

Oscar Wilde

91. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Oscar Wilde

92. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Oscar Wilde

93. The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

Oscar Wilde

94. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Oscar Wilde

95. To define is to limit.

Oscar Wilde

96. Who, being loved, is poor?

Oscar Wilde

97. Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

Oscar Wilde

98. A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Oscar Wilde

99. Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Oscar Wilde

100. Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

Oscar Wilde

101. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

Oscar Wilde

102. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Oscar Wilde

103. 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

104. Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

Oscar Wilde

105. There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

Oscar Wilde

106. Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

Oscar Wilde

107. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.

Oscar Wilde

108. Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

Oscar Wilde

109. 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

110. Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Oscar Wilde

111. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Oscar Wilde

112. The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.

Oscar Wilde

113. Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.

Oscar Wilde

114. 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.

Oscar Wilde

115. With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?

Oscar Wilde

116. A man can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Oscar Wilde

117. Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

Oscar Wilde

118. Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde

119. Women are made to be loved, not understood.

Oscar Wilde

120. One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

Oscar Wilde

121. It is always the unreadable that occurs.

Oscar Wilde

122. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

Oscar Wilde

123. When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Wilde

125. I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

Oscar Wilde

126. An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

Oscar Wilde

127. There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Oscar Wilde