Top 500 Oscar Wilde Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”

— Oscar Wilde

252. “My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s.”

— Oscar Wilde

253. “Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.”

— Oscar Wilde

254. “Marriage is a long, dull meal with dessert served at the beginning.”

— Oscar Wilde

255. “The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone – for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.”

— Oscar Wilde

256. “The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.”

— Oscar Wilde

257. “Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.”

— Oscar Wilde

258. “The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.”

— Oscar Wilde

259. “The curves of your lips rewrite history.”

— Oscar Wilde

260. “And alien tears will fill for him pity’s long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.”

— Oscar Wilde

261. “Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.”

— Oscar Wilde

262. “Life under a good government is rarely dramatic; life under a bad government is always so.”

— Oscar Wilde

263. “In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.”

— Oscar Wilde

264. “One should always be a little improbable.”

— Oscar Wilde

265. “I know. In fact, I am never wrong.”

— Oscar Wilde

266. “There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.”

— Oscar Wilde

267. “Music is the perfect type of art.”

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

269. “Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.”

— Oscar Wilde

270. “I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else.”

— Oscar Wilde

271. “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

— Oscar Wilde

272. “All great ideas are dangerous.”

— Oscar Wilde

273. “When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.”

— Oscar Wilde

274. “The best way to make children good is to make them happy.”

— Oscar Wilde

275. “A burnt child loves the fire.”

— Oscar Wilde

276. “If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”

— Oscar Wilde

277. “He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

— Oscar Wilde

278. “There is no Mystery so great as Misery.”

— Oscar Wilde

279. “Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.”

— Oscar Wilde

280. “In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.”

— Oscar Wilde

281. “To be good is to be in harmony with oneself. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.”

— Oscar Wilde

282. “Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.”

— Oscar Wilde

283. “Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.”

— Oscar Wilde

284. “The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.”

— Oscar Wilde

285. “Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.”

— Oscar Wilde

286. “Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art.”

— Oscar Wilde

287. “Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.”

— Oscar Wilde

288. “Circumstances should never alter principles!”

— Oscar Wilde

289. “Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.”

— Oscar Wilde

290. “They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.”

— Oscar Wilde

291. “The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.”

— Oscar Wilde

292. “My philosophy? I’m always right and you are wrong.”

— Oscar Wilde

293. “The man who says his wife can’t take a joke, forgets that she took him.”

— Oscar Wilde

294. “Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.”

— Oscar Wilde

295. “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.”

— Oscar Wilde

296. “How does one cure the soul? Through the senses.”

— Oscar Wilde

297. “Each of us has heaven and hell in him...”

— Oscar Wilde

298. “One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.”

— Oscar Wilde

299. “We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.”

— Oscar Wilde

300. “The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.”

— Oscar Wilde