Quotations from

Oscar Wilde

About

Picture of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish author, poet and playwright. After writing in different literary styles throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular and influential dramatists in London in the early 1890s. He was a key figure in the emerging Aestheticism movement of the late 19th century and is widely regarded as the greatest playwright of the Victorian era. Wilde is best known for his Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), his epigrams, plays and bedtime stories for children, as well as his criminal conviction in 1895 for gross indecency and for practicing homosexual acts.

from Wikipedia

Quotes from Oscar Wilde

We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.

—Oscar Wilde

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

—Oscar Wilde

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

—Oscar Wilde

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

—Oscar Wilde

Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.

—Oscar Wilde

The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.

—Oscar Wilde

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

—Oscar Wilde

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

—Oscar Wilde

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

—Oscar Wilde

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.

—Oscar Wilde

There's nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.

—Oscar Wilde

I am not young enough to know everything.

—Oscar Wilde

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

—Oscar Wilde

As one reads history . . . one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

—Oscar Wilde

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

—Oscar Wilde

Books

Oscar Wilde has the following books quoted on Quodid: