"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
- Oscar Wilde
Self-confidence
"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
- Oscar Wilde
Awareness
"With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?"
- Oscar Wilde
Motivation
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
- Oscar Wilde
Optimism
"Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead."
- Oscar Wilde
Love
"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
- Oscar Wilde
Self-care
"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
Love
"Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary."
- Oscar Wilde
Love
"Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more."
- Oscar Wilde
Ambition
"You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes or their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear."
- Oscar Wilde
Love
"Who, being loved, is poor?"
- Oscar Wilde
Love
"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
Reflection
"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
Education
"Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."
- Oscar Wilde
Hope
"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
- Oscar Wilde
Imagination
"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."
- Oscar Wilde
Learning from Mistakes
"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
- Oscar Wilde
Education
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
- Oscar Wilde
Self-awareness
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
- Oscar Wilde
Forgiveness
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."
- Oscar Wilde
Happiness
"Youth is wasted on the young."
- Oscar Wilde
Reflection
"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
Morality
"When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers."
- Oscar Wilde
Adversity
"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."
- Oscar Wilde
Education
"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."
- Oscar Wilde
Self-awareness
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy
"A man who does not think for himself does not think at all."
- Oscar Wilde
Self-awareness
"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection."
- Oscar Wilde
Creativity
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell the truth."
- Oscar Wilde
Honesty
"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
Philosophy
"What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy
"Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us."
- Oscar Wilde
Reflection
"Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are."
- Oscar Wilde
Insight
"Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life."
- Oscar Wilde
Creativity
"All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital."
- Oscar Wilde
Creativity
"The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."
- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy
"Everything in moderation, including moderation."
- Oscar Wilde
Health
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
- Oscar Wilde
Wisdom
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
- Oscar Wilde
Creativity
"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one."
- Oscar Wilde
Relationships
"Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result."
- Oscar Wilde
Success
"There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."
- Oscar Wilde
Adversity
"If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life."
- Oscar Wilde
Love
"Never mind what I say. I am always saying what I shouldn’t say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood."
- Oscar Wilde
Honesty
"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up."
- Oscar Wilde
Self-awareness
"Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals."
- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy
"Make people laugh when you tell them the truth, or they will kill you."
- Oscar Wilde
Courage
"True friends stab you in the front."
- Oscar Wilde
Relationships
"A good friend will always stab you in the front."
- Oscar Wilde
Relationships
"No man is rich enough to buy back his past."
- Oscar Wilde
Reflection
"Life is far too important a thing to ever talk seriously about."
- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy
"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
- Oscar Wilde
Belief
"Seriousness is the last refuge of the shallow."
- Oscar Wilde
Originality
"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike."
- Oscar Wilde
Morality
"Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not."
- Oscar Wilde
Awareness
"I have nothing to declare but my genius!"
- Oscar Wilde
Self-confidence
"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
- Oscar Wilde
Relationships
"I am not young enough to know everything."
- J.M. Barrie
Wisdom
"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."
- Oscar Wilde
Contentment
"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy
"The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything."
- Oscar Wilde
Awareness
"It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But... it is better to be good than to be ugly."
- Oscar Wilde
Morality
"I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about."
- Oscar Wilde
Self-awareness
"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."
- Oscar Wilde
Reflection
"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."
- Oscar Wilde
Insight
"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
- Oscar Wilde
Awareness
"Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them."
- Oscar Wilde
Forgiveness
"Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
- Oscar Wilde
Creativity
"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
Awareness
"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius."
- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy
"Ambition is the last refuge of the failure."
- Oscar Wilde
Ambition
"I have the simplest of tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."
- Oscar Wilde
Contentment
"I can resist everything except temptation."
- Oscar Wilde
Creativity
"The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast."
- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy
"The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself."
- Oscar Wilde
Wisdom
"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
Philosophy
"Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess."
- Oscar Wilde
Balance
"If I can't be famous I'll be notorious."
- Oscar Wilde
Ambition
"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."
- Oscar Wilde
Family
"One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry."
- Oscar Wilde
Love
"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
- Oscar Wilde
Creativity
"When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers."
- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy
"It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing."
- Oscar Wilde
Insight
"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation."
- Oscar Wilde
Self-awareness
"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."
- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy
"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
- Oscar Wilde
Bravery
"If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk."
- Oscar Wilde
Creativity
"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."
- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
- Oscar Wilde
Relationships
"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
- Oscar Wilde
Ambition
"My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go."
- Oscar Wilde
Originality
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."
- Oscar Wilde
Awareness
"This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last."
- Oscar Wilde
Ambition
"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."
- Oscar Wilde
Philosophy
"I can never travel without my diary, one should always have something sensational to read on the train."
- Oscar Wilde
Inspiration
"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."
- Oscar Wilde
Morality