Quotes from Oscar Wilde

You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.

The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

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

She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.

If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.

How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless. Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them. I say it's perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.

I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!

Everything popular is wrong.

Irony is wasted on the stupid

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

When the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible....

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

The one charm about the past is that it is the past.

I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.