Quotes from Oscar Wilde

"You don't love somebody for their looks, or their clothes or for their fancy car; but because they sing a song only you can hear."

I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.

I am not young enough to know everything.

A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.

We live, I regret to say, in an age of Big Data hype.

We live in the age of the overworked and the undereducated.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

When I had to fill in my immigration papers, I gave my age as 19, and my profession as genius; I added that I had nothing to declare except my talent.

He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.

It is personalities not principles that move the age.

You are perfectly right in making some slight alteration. Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

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

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.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

All art is quite useless.

I put my talent in my work, I save my Genius for my life.

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.

The best way to appreciate your job is to, is here to stay.

Every single work of art is the fulfillment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.