Quotes About Oscar Wilde

Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.

To love one's self is the beginning of a life-long romance

What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century

Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.

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

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.

Vulgarity is the conduct of other people, just as falsehoods are the truths of other people

Whatever harsh criticisms may be passed on the construction of her sentences, she at least possesses that one touch of vulgarity that makes the whole world kin.

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.

Self denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibers, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy.

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.

History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

When a voice behind me whispered low,"That fellow's got to swing."

Chastity is the greatest form of perversion.

Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.

I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.

As a postscript, it is interesting to note that on a visit to London in 1886, Ouida did meet Oscar Wilde and indeed published four articles in his magazine Woman's World between 1888 and 1889; her experience of knowing Wilde, who described her as "the last romantic", did influence her later works, however superficially.