Oscar Wilde Quotes

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete1854–1900 55 quotes

Oscar Wilde was an Irish author, poet and playwright who became one of the most popular and influential dramatists in London in the early 1890s. A key figure of the Aestheticism movement, he is widely regarded as the greatest playwright of the Victorian era. He is best known for his Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his epigrams, his plays and his stories for children.

His parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. He proved an exceptional classicist at Trinity College Dublin and then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was drawn to aestheticism through his tutors Walter Pater and John Ruskin. In 1895 he was convicted of gross indecency for homosexual acts. The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest are his most quoted works in our library.
Most quoted works
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray 200
  • The Importance of Being Earnest 53
  • An Ideal Husband 23
  • De Profundis 17
  • The Soul of Man Under Socialism 17
  • Lady Windermere's Fan 11
Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

Yet each man kills the thing he loves / By each let this be heard / Some do it with a bitter look / Some with a flattering word / The coward does it with a kiss / The brave man with a sword

— The Ballad Of Reading Gaol

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.

— The Picture of Dorian Gray

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.

— The Picture of Dorian Gray

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

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 own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

— De Profundis

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.

— The Picture of Dorian Gray

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

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

— Lady Windermere's Fan

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

What fire does not destroy, it hardens

— The Picture of Dorian Gray

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

— The Importance of Being Earnest

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

— The Picture of Dorian Gray

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

— The Importance of Being Earnest

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.

— The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.

— The Importance of Being Earnest

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

— An Ideal Husband

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

— The Picture of Dorian Gray

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.

— The Picture of Dorian Gray

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.

— De Profundis

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

— The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and Selected Critical Prose

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.

— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

something was dead in each of us, and what was dead was hope.

— The Ballad Of Reading Gaol

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

— The Picture of Dorian Gray

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.

— The Picture of Dorian Gray

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.

— Reviews

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

— The Critic as Artist