Top 500 Oscar Wilde Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.”

— Oscar Wilde

452. “The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.”

— Oscar Wilde

453. “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

454. “I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.”

— Oscar Wilde

455. “Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you.”

— Oscar Wilde

456. “In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.”

— Oscar Wilde

457. “By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”

— Oscar Wilde

458. “All bad art is the result of good intentions.”

— Oscar Wilde

459. “As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.”

— Oscar Wilde

460. “The Americans are identical to the British in all respects except, of course, language.”

— Oscar Wilde

461. “There is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty.”

— Oscar Wilde

462. “It is always the unreadable that occurs.”

— Oscar Wilde

463. “If music be the food of love, get me a supersized big mac, chips, two apple pies and a large milkshake.”

— Oscar Wilde

464. “Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.”

— Oscar Wilde

465. “If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.”

— Oscar Wilde

466. “A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.”

— Oscar Wilde

467. “And now, dear Mr. Worthing, I will not intrude any longer into a house of sorrow. I would merely beg you not to be too much bowed down by grief. What seem to us bitter trials are often blessings in disguise. This seems to me a blessing of an extremely obvious kind.”

— Oscar Wilde

468. “It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.”

— Oscar Wilde

469. “The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.”

— Oscar Wilde

470. “One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers.”

— Oscar Wilde

471. “Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it comes into existence.”

— Oscar Wilde

472. “I can believe anything provided it is incredible.”

— Oscar Wilde

473. “The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.”

— Oscar Wilde

474. “I am Irish by race but the English have condemned me to talk the language of Shakespeare.”

— Oscar Wilde

475. “The Americans are certainly hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.”

— Oscar Wilde

476. “Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.”

— Oscar Wilde

477. “I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.”

— Oscar Wilde

478. “The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability.”

— Oscar Wilde

479. “Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”

— Oscar Wilde

480. “The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.”

— Oscar Wilde

481. “The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.”

— Oscar Wilde

482. “Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.”

— Oscar Wilde

483. “What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.”

— Oscar Wilde

484. “If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.”

— Oscar Wilde

485. “Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.”

— Oscar Wilde

486. “Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don’t think it right.”

— Oscar Wilde

487. “As a wicked man I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back.”

— Oscar Wilde

488. “The sky was pure opal now.”

— Oscar Wilde

489. “I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”

— Oscar Wilde

490. “What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”

— Oscar Wilde

491. “Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.”

— Oscar Wilde

492. “The only thing I cannot resist is temptation.”

— Oscar Wilde

493. “I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.”

— Oscar Wilde

494. “Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.”

— Oscar Wilde

495. “A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.”

— Oscar Wilde

496. “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

— Oscar Wilde

497. “Starvation, not sin, is the parent of modern crime.”

— Oscar Wilde

498. “Art only begins where Imitation ends.”

— Oscar Wilde

499. “Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.”

— Oscar Wilde

500. “The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.”

— Oscar Wilde