Oscar Wilde
662 quotes
Biography
Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde 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.
"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
"Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not."
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
"Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result."
"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."
"One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead."
"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist."
"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."
"It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes."
"Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force."
"Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination."
"There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better."
"It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."
"Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood."
"A good friend will always stab you in the front."
"When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is."
"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
"Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary."
"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
"The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart."