Top 500 Oscar Wilde Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

Featured in: Ambition Quotes, Progress Quotes

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

154. “All art is quite useless.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

156. “Life is too short to be in a hurry.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

159. “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.”

— Oscar Wilde

160. “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

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

163. “There is no sin except stupidity.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

171. “Life is a great disappointment.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

174. “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

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

— Oscar Wilde

176. “Progress is the realization of utopia.”

— Oscar Wilde

177. “Only good questions deserve good answers.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

179. “Most people are boring and stupid.”

— Oscar Wilde

180. “Wisdom comes with winters.”

— Oscar Wilde

Featured in: Winter Quotes

181. “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

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

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

— Oscar Wilde

186. “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

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. “I can resist everything except temptation.”

— Oscar Wilde

189. “Everything popular is wrong.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

191. “Irony is wasted on the stupid.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

196. “Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Sexy Quotes

198. “The only one you need in your life is that person who shows you he needs you in his.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

200. “It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.”

— Oscar Wilde