Top 500 Oscar Wilde Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The ugly can be beautiful. The pretty, never.”

— Oscar Wilde

302. “A man’s very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.”

— Oscar Wilde

303. “Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.”

— Oscar Wilde

304. “Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow one another like the withered leaves of Autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity.”

— Oscar Wilde

305. “All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.”

— Oscar Wilde

306. “Extravagance is the luxury of the poor; penury is the luxury of the rich.”

— Oscar Wilde

307. “Loveless marriages are horrible. But there is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage. A marriage in which there is love, but on one side only; faith, but on one side only; devotion, but on one side only, and in which of the two hearts one is sure to be broken.”

— Oscar Wilde

308. “I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.”

— Oscar Wilde

309. “The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.”

— Oscar Wilde

310. “If we’re always guided by other people’s thoughts, what’s the point in having our own?”

— Oscar Wilde

311. “Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.”

— Oscar Wilde

312. “How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?”

— Oscar Wilde

313. “I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean.”

— Oscar Wilde

314. “Whenever I’m in doubt, I ask myself, ‘What would Jesus do?’ And then I realize, Jesus got crucified, so maybe his decision-making isn’t all that great.”

— Oscar Wilde

315. “But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.”

— Oscar Wilde

316. “To become a spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life.”

— Oscar Wilde

317. “To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.”

— Oscar Wilde

318. “It is personalities not principles that move the age.”

— Oscar Wilde

319. “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.”

— Oscar Wilde

320. “He made me see what Life is, and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than both.”

— Oscar Wilde

321. “The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”

— Oscar Wilde

322. “It is perfectly possible to get what you think you want and be miserable. It’s possible too, to never get it but deeply enjoy the process of trying. In this world, there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

— Oscar Wilde

323. “When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.”

— Oscar Wilde

324. “Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.”

— Oscar Wilde

325. “Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.”

— Oscar Wilde

326. “The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.”

— Oscar Wilde

327. “Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”

— Oscar Wilde

328. “Pleasures may turn a heart to stone, riches may make it callous, but sorrows cannot break it. Hearts live by being wounded.”

— Oscar Wilde

329. “Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.”

— Oscar Wilde

330. “The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”

— Oscar Wilde

331. “Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.”

— Oscar Wilde

332. “I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.”

— Oscar Wilde

333. “Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask.”

— Oscar Wilde

334. “It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.”

— Oscar Wilde

335. “If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture...”

— Oscar Wilde

336. “Rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians.”

— Oscar Wilde

337. “It is only through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; Through Art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.”

— Oscar Wilde

338. “A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.”

— Oscar Wilde

339. “A grapefruit is just a lemon that saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.”

— Oscar Wilde

340. “Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned.”

— Oscar Wilde

341. “Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.”

— Oscar Wilde

342. “To look at a thing is very different from seeing it.”

— Oscar Wilde

343. “When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.”

— Oscar Wilde

344. “The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.”

— Oscar Wilde

345. “Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all.”

— Oscar Wilde

346. “Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.”

— Oscar Wilde

347. “There can be nothing more frequent than an occasional drink.”

— Oscar Wilde

348. “Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.”

— Oscar Wilde

349. “The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.”

— Oscar Wilde

350. “I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”

— Oscar Wilde