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Oscar Wilde
  • I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
    (topic: advice)


  • The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
    (topic: age)


  • Those whom the gods love grow young.
    (topic: age)


  • In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
    (topic: age)


  • Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
    (topic: ambition)


  • It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
    (topic: charm)


  • Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
    (topic: colors)


  • Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
    (topic: common sense)


  • The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
    (topic: creativity)


  • There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
    (topic: destiny)


  • Children have a natural antipathy to books--handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous.
    (topic: education)


  • Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
    (topic: education)


  • I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
    (topic: enemies)


  • To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
    (topic: experience)


  • A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
    (topic: faces)


  • The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
    (topic: future)


  • I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
    (topic: genius)


  • There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
    (topic: gossip)


  • There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
    (topic: knowledge)


  • If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
    (topic: loyalty)


  • The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.
    (topic: lying)


  • What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.
    (topic: lying)


  • Men marry because they are tired;
    women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
    (topic: marriage)


  • 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.
    (topic: marriage)


  • Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
    (topic: men and women)


  • Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What (women) like is to be a man's last romance.
    (topic: men and women)


  • Moderation is a fatal thing... Nothing succeeds like excess.
    (topic: moderation)


  • It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
    (topic: money)


  • Lord Illingworth: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.
    Mrs. Allonby: No man does. That is his.
    (topic: mothers)


  • The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
    (topic: optimism)


  • One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
    (topic: past)


  • It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection.
    (topic: perfection)


  • When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
    (topic: prayer)


  • He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
    (topic: punctuality)


  • He must have a truly romantic nature, for he weeps when there is nothing at all to weep about.
    (topic: romance)


  • How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.
    (topic: soul)


  • The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
    (topic: truth)