Quotes by Oscar Wilde

If we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it.
--Oscar Wilde

Bernard Shaw is an excellent man; he has not an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him either.
--Oscar Wilde

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
--Oscar Wilde

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
--Oscar Wilde

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
--Oscar Wilde

I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
--Oscar Wilde

Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
--Oscar Wilde

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.
--Oscar Wilde

The English country gentleman galloping after a fox -- the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
--Oscar Wilde

Nothing succeeds like excess.
--Oscar Wilde

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
--Oscar Wilde

The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.
--Oscar Wilde

Murder is always a mistake -- one should never do anything one cannot talk about after dinner.
--Oscar Wilde

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.
--Oscar Wilde

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
--Oscar Wilde

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
--Oscar Wilde

Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
--Oscar Wilde

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
--Oscar Wilde

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
--Oscar Wilde

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
--Oscar Wilde

What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with any woman so long as he doesn't love her.
--Oscar Wilde

It is most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when they're alone. The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life.
--Oscar Wilde

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

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
--Oscar Wilde

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
--Oscar Wilde