Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Education is very admirable but let us not forget that anything worth knowing cannot be taught.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.

Perhaps one never seems so much at ones ease as when one has to play a part.

It is the duty of every father... to write fairy tales for his children.

The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.

The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

If God wished to punish us, all he would need to do would be to answer our prayers.

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

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life.

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

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

The security of Society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of Society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.

You can fake intelligence, but you can't fake wit.

The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.

In a temple everything should be serious except the thing that is being worshiped.

The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair.