Top 500 Oscar Wilde Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Finding the meaning of life is easy. Simply get a dictionary, go to the ‘L’ section, and find the word ‘life.’”

— Oscar Wilde

452. “After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.”

— Oscar Wilde

453. “Intuition is a strange instinct that tells a woman she is right, whether she is or not.”

— Oscar Wilde

454. “My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”

— Oscar Wilde

455. “A man who pays his bills on time is soon forgotten.”

— Oscar Wilde

456. “I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

459. “An egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different.”

— Oscar Wilde

460. “A daughter is a mother’s gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of herself. -Author Unknown As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.”

— Oscar Wilde

461. “Behind the perfection of a man’s style, must lie the passion of a man’s soul.”

— Oscar Wilde

462. “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

463. “Genius is born-not paid.”

— Oscar Wilde

464. “I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching -that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

466. “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

467. “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

468. “No gentleman ever has any money.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

472. “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

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

— Oscar Wilde

474. “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

475. “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

476. “Art only begins where Imitation ends.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

481. “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

482. “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

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

485. “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

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

493. “The sky was pure opal now.”

— Oscar Wilde

494. “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

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

— Oscar Wilde

496. “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

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde