Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.

(A country where) the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

Always! That is the dreadful word ... it is a meaningless word, too.

At every single moment of one's life, one is going to be no less than what one has been.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

If England treats her criminals the way she has treated me, she doesn't deserve to have any.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

He hasn't an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him.

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

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

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

As a rule, I think they are quite impossible. Geniuses talk so much, don't they? Such a bad habit! And they are always thinking about themselves, when I want them to be thinking about me.

If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.