Quotes by Oscar Wilde

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

I like men who have a future and women who have a past.

The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.

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

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the worlds original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

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

It is perfectly monstrous, he said, at last, the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind ones back that are absolutely and entirely true.

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldnt. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldnt read.

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.

Why cant these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.

I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.

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

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the Peoples Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summers day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep heights that the soul is competent to gain. We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into ones cell, and into the cell of ones heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep ones house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is ones chance or choice to be.