Wilde Wisdom: A Curated Collection of Oscar Wilde's Most Inspirational Quotes

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?"

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"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

"Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary."

- Oscar Wilde

"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

"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

"Who, being loved, is poor?"

- Oscar Wilde

"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

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"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

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"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

"Youth is wasted on the young."

- Oscar Wilde

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"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

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

- Oscar Wilde

"Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"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

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

- Oscar Wilde

"Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are."

- Oscar Wilde

"Everything in moderation, including moderation."

- Oscar Wilde

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."

- Oscar Wilde

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"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

"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up."

- Oscar Wilde

"Make people laugh when you tell them the truth, or they will kill you."

- Oscar Wilde

"A good friend will always stab you in the front."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"True friends stab you in the front."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"Seriousness is the last refuge of the shallow."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"I have nothing to declare but my genius!"

- Oscar Wilde

"I am not young enough to know everything."

- J.M. Barrie

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about."

- Oscar Wilde

"Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."

- Oscar Wilde

"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

"Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"I can resist everything except temptation."

- Oscar Wilde

"Ambition is the last refuge of the failure."

- Oscar Wilde

"I have the simplest of tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."

- Oscar Wilde

"If I can't be famous I'll be notorious."

- Oscar Wilde

"Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess."

- Oscar Wilde

"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

- Oscar Wilde

"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

"It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation."

- Oscar Wilde

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."

- Oscar Wilde

"If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go."

- Oscar Wilde

"This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last."

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Oscar Wilde

"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."

- Oscar Wilde

"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."

- Oscar Wilde

"I can never travel without my diary, one should always have something sensational to read on the train."

- Oscar Wilde