Quotes from Oscar Wilde

The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory.

Who is that man over there? I don't know him. What is he doing? Is he a conspirator? Have you searched him? Give him till tomorrow to confess, then hang him! -- hang him!

By the artificial separation of soul and body men have invented a Realism that is vulgar and an Idealism that is void.

Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.

LADY BRACKNELL Algernon is an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, eligible young man. He has nothing, but he looks everything. What more can one desire?

What is said of man is nothing; the point is, who says it.

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men.

When I see a spade, I call it a spade. I'm glad to say I have never seen a spade. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use it. It's the only thing he's fit for.

In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.

As a wicked man I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back.

There was purification in punishment. Not 'Forgive us our sins,' but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of a man to a most just God.

It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.

Men of thoughts should have nothing to do with action.

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

There is no man who is not, at each moment, what he has been and what he will be.

Credit is a young man's capital.

Disobedience is man's original virtue.

It is curious how vanity helps the successful man and wrecks the failure.

A woman's life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses.

Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.

Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true.

The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married.

Oh, how I vainly wished to the bearded man in the sky that I was Neapolitan. Why? So I could bring in a fine Neapolitan pest control to help with Queensberry's problem before it gets out of hand.

Talk to a woman as if you loved her, and to a man as if he bored you.