Quotes by Oscar Wilde

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

Bad artists always admire each others work.

They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.

Mary Farquhar, who always flirts with her own husband across the dinner-table. That is not very pleasant. Indeed, it is not even decent . . . and that sort of thing is enormously on the increase. The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing ones clean linen in public...

You dont seem to realise, that in married life three is company and two is none.

ALGERNON. I really dont see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, Ill certainly try to forget the fact.JACK. I have no doubt about that, dear Algy. The Divorce Court was specially invented for people whose memories are so curiously constituted.ALGERNON. Oh! there is no use speculating on that subject. Divorces are made in Heaven-...

The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.

In war, answered the weaver, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.

It is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.

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

Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.

And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.

Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves?

Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Experience is one thing you cant get for nothing.

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

Experience is a question of instinct about life.

Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.

Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.