Top 100 Oscar Wilde Quotes On Love, Life, Success, Society, Wisdom and More...
04-28-2025, 11:32 PM
Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet, playwright, and novelist, born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin. Celebrated for his sharp wit, flamboyant style, and keen social commentary, Wilde became one of the most prominent literary figures of the late 19th century. After studying at Trinity College Dublin and later at Oxford University, he quickly gained fame for his brilliant conversational skills and unique aesthetic views.
Wilde’s most famous works include the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the plays The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, and Lady Windermere’s Fan. His writing often satirized Victorian society, exposing its hypocrisies with humor and elegance. Wilde was also known for his collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, which showcased his sensitivity to human suffering and moral complexity.
He became a cultural icon, renowned not only for his literary achievements but also for his personal life. Wilde’s downfall came after his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas led to a scandalous trial and imprisonment for "gross indecency," due to the criminalization of homosexuality at the time. After serving two years of hard labor, he lived the remainder of his life in exile in France, dying in 1900. Despite his tragic end, Oscar Wilde remains celebrated for his enduring wit, literary brilliance, and courageous individuality.
Quote Of The day - Oscar Wilde Quotes - Good Reads 📖📖📚📚
Oscar Wilde Quotes On Life:
"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
"Life is too important to be taken seriously."
"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."
"Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not."
"The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast."
"The aim of life is self-development."
"Everything popular is wrong."
"I can resist everything except temptation."
"The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on."
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
"We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities."
"One should always be a little improbable."
"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."
"Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot."
"Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success."
Oscar Wilde Quotes On Love: 💕💕❤❤💗
"Who, being loved, is poor?"
"Men always want to be a woman's first love – women like to be a man's last romance."
"Hatred is blind, as well as love."
"Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood."
"Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance."
"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."
"When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others."
"Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead."
"A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her."
"The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death."
Oscar Wilde Quotes On Art:
"No great artist ever sees things as they really are."
"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."
"Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious."
"Art never expresses anything but itself."
"The artist is the creator of beautiful things."
"The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates."
"All art is quite useless."
"Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic."
"To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of true life."
Oscar Wilde Quotes On Society:
"Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals."
"The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else."
"Society forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer."
"Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."
"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing."
"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we dislike."
"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
"In modern life, nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude."
"Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them."
Oscar Wilde Quotes On Human Nature:
"We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell."
"The only real people are the people who never existed."
"Fathers should neither be seen nor heard."
"Every woman is a rebel at heart."
"The heart was made to be broken."
"Good intentions are simply not good enough."
"Women love us for our defects."
Oscar Wilde Quotes On Wisdom & Knowledge:
"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
"I am not young enough to know everything."
"I have nothing to declare except my genius."
"The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything."
"Only the shallow know themselves."
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
"Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative."
"No man is rich enough to buy back his past."
"It is very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better."
Oscar Wilde Quotes On Happiness:
"The best way to make children good is to make them happy."
"Pleasure is the only thing one should live for."
"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."
"One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead."
"A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks."
"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up."
"It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it."
"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
Oscar Wilde Quotes On Success & Ambition:
"Ambition is the last refuge of the failure."
"Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result."
"Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons."
"To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect."
"Ordinary people wait for the time to change. The wise change the time."
"Action is the last refuge of those who cannot dream."
"Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope."
Oscar Wilde Quotes On Miscellaneous:
"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."
"Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable."
"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
"Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us."
"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."
"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
"Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious."
"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards."
"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read."
"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means."
"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."
"The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life."
"Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them."
"Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing."
"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable."
"The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived."
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
"To define is to limit."
"The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic."
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
"The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."
"It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it."
Which one is your favourite?