1. Everything popular is wrong.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

4. Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

6. How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?

- Oscar Wilde

7. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

- Oscar Wilde

8. When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

- Oscar Wilde

9. A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.

- Oscar Wilde

10. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

- Oscar Wilde

11. 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

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

- Oscar Wilde

13. We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

- Oscar Wilde

14. Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

- Oscar Wilde

15. The one charm about the past is that it is the past.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

17. There is no sin except stupidity.

- Oscar Wilde

18. America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

- Oscar Wilde

19. One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.

- Oscar Wilde

20. If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

22. Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.

- Oscar Wilde

23. Some things are more precious because they don’t last long.

- Oscar Wilde

24. A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

- Oscar Wilde

25. They’ve promised that dreams can come true – but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.

- Oscar Wilde

26. 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

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

- Oscar Wilde

28. Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

- Oscar Wilde

29. The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

- Oscar Wilde

30. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

- Oscar Wilde

31. An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

- Oscar Wilde

32. Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

34. 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

35. I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do – the day after.

- Oscar Wilde

36. I can resist anything except temptation.

- Oscar Wilde

37. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

- Oscar Wilde

38. The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

42. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

45. Hearts are made to be broken.

- Oscar Wilde

46. After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.

- Oscar Wilde

47. Life is too short to learn German.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

49. 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

50. I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

- Oscar Wilde

51. All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

53. In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

56. Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won’t be invited to cocktail parties.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

58. Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.

- Oscar Wilde

59. My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

62. 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

63. The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

- Oscar Wilde

64. To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

67. Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

71. One should always be in love. That’s the reason one should never marry.

- Oscar Wilde

72. Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

74. Who, being loved, is poor?

- Oscar Wilde

75. Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

- Oscar Wilde

76. 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

77. In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

79. Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.

- Oscar Wilde

80. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

- Oscar Wilde

81. They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.

- Oscar Wilde

82. It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

85. The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

87. A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

- Oscar Wilde

88. I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

90. When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

- Oscar Wilde

91. Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative.

- Oscar Wilde

92. Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

94. Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

96. After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.

- Oscar Wilde

97. Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

- Oscar Wilde

98. I love to talk about nothing. It’s the only thing I know anything about.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

100. A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.

- Oscar Wilde

101. Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

- Oscar Wilde

102. The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

104. 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

105. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

107. Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

- Oscar Wilde

108. The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

110. 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

111. Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

- Oscar Wilde

112. No good deed goes unpunished.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

114. I beg your pardon I didn’t recognize you – I’ve changed a lot.

- Oscar Wilde

115. I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.

- Oscar Wilde

116. If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

118. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

120. Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

122. I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

125. 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

126. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

- Oscar Wilde