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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Oscar Wilde Quotes

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

– Oscar Wilde

Young women of the present day seem to make it the sole object of their lives to be always playing with fire.

– Oscar Wilde

A Woman of No Importance, Lady Caroline, Act 1.

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.

– Oscar Wilde

Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Darlington, Act 1.

Lady Basildon: Ah! I hate being educated!
Mrs. Marchmont: So do I. It puts one almost on a level with the commercial classes, doesn’t it?

– Oscar Wilde

An Ideal Husband, Act 1.

Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.

– Oscar Wilde

The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Divorces are made in Heaven. - Oscar Wilde

Divorces are made in Heaven.

– Oscar Wilde

The Importance of being Earnest, Algernon, Act 1.

I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that.

– Oscar Wilde

I don’t want to earn a living; I want to live.

– Oscar Wilde

In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.

– Oscar Wilde

The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Hester: We have the largest country in the world, Lady Caroline. They used to tell us at school that some of our states are as big as France and England put together.
Lady Caroline: Ah! you must find it very draughty, I should fancy.

– Oscar Wilde

A Woman of No Importance, Act 1.

The man who says his wife can’t take a joke, forgets that she took him.

– Oscar Wilde

Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.

– Oscar Wilde

Lady Windermere’s Fan, Duchess of Berwick, Act 1.

Anyone who lives within their means, suffers from a lack of imagination.

– Oscar Wilde

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

– Oscar Wilde

An Ideal Husband, Mrs. Cheveley, Act 1.

Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die. It is wretched that they should have to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of society that it should force them to do so.

– Oscar Wilde

Somehow I don’t think I shall survive to see the new century – if another century began and I was still alive, it would really be more than the English could stand.

– Oscar Wilde

Predicting his own death to friend Robert Ross in 1900. He died on November 30, 1900.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

– Oscar Wilde

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

– Oscar Wilde

The Critic as Artist

Girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don’t think it right. - Oscar Wilde

Girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don’t think it right.

– Oscar Wilde

The Importance of being Earnest, Algernon, Act 1.

One has never heard his name before in the whole course of one’s life, which speaks volumes for a man, nowadays.

– Oscar Wilde

A Woman of No Importance, Lady Caroline, Act 1.

The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

– Oscar Wilde

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

– Oscar Wilde

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

– Oscar Wilde

The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.

– Oscar Wilde

The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Can’t make out how you stand London Society. The thing has gone to the dogs, a lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing.

– Oscar Wilde

An Ideal Husband, Lord Caversham, Act 1.

Genius is born – not paid.

– Oscar Wilde

Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They’re the only things we can pay.

– Oscar Wilde

Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Darlington, Act 1.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

– Oscar Wilde

Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed.

– Oscar Wilde

The Model Millionaire

Biography lends to death a new terror.

– Oscar Wilde

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