Top 500 Oscar Wilde Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Life is too short to be in a hurry.”

— Oscar Wilde

152. “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”

— Oscar Wilde

153. “What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise for which we are later, in the fullness of time and understanding, very grateful for!”

— Oscar Wilde

154. “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

155. “What fire does not destroy, it hardens.”

— Oscar Wilde

156. “Don’t feed the trolls; nothing fuels them so much.”

— Oscar Wilde

157. “It was only in the theatre that I lived.”

— Oscar Wilde

158. “All art is quite useless.”

— Oscar Wilde

159. “Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.”

— Oscar Wilde

160. “Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.”

— Oscar Wilde

161. “If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.”

— Oscar Wilde

162. “Everyone may not be good, but there’s always something good in everyone. Never judge anyone shortly because every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”

— Oscar Wilde

163. “I am very glad I have travelled. Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices.”

— Oscar Wilde

164. “There is no sin except stupidity.”

— Oscar Wilde

165. “Love is like a war; easy to start but hard to end and you never know where it might take you.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

168. “Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn’t there, and finding it.”

— Oscar Wilde

169. “Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good.”

— Oscar Wilde

170. “Life is a great disappointment.”

— Oscar Wilde

171. “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market place of any single thing.”

— Oscar Wilde

172. “Progress is the realization of utopia.”

— Oscar Wilde

173. “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”

— Oscar Wilde

174. “Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.”

— Oscar Wilde

175. “Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

— Oscar Wilde

176. “Don’t use big words. They mean so little.”

— Oscar Wilde

177. “The best people to work for are me, myself and I.”

— Oscar Wilde

178. “You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”

— Oscar Wilde

179. “The aim of love is to love. No more, no less.”

— Oscar Wilde

180. “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.”

— Oscar Wilde

181. “Everything popular is wrong.”

— Oscar Wilde

182. “There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.”

— Oscar Wilde

183. “When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.”

— Oscar Wilde

184. “I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.”

— Oscar Wilde

185. “Only good questions deserve good answers.”

— Oscar Wilde

186. “Wisdom comes with winters.”

— Oscar Wilde

187. “Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard Some do it with a bitter look Some with a flattering word The coward does it with a kiss The brave man with a sword.”

— Oscar Wilde

188. “Most people are boring and stupid.”

— Oscar Wilde

189. “Illusion is the first of all pleasures.”

— Oscar Wilde

190. “Irony is wasted on the stupid.”

— Oscar Wilde

191. “I can resist everything except temptation.”

— Oscar Wilde

192. “The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself.”

— Oscar Wilde

193. “Sometimes it takes courage to give into temptation.”

— Oscar Wilde

194. “Nature: a place where birds fly around uncooked.”

— Oscar Wilde

195. “Beauty is a form of genius – is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.”

— Oscar Wilde

196. “I’m so smart, I read and understand Hegel.”

— Oscar Wilde

197. “Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm.”

— Oscar Wilde

198. “To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

200. “When you really want love you will find it waiting for you.”

— Oscar Wilde