Oscar Wilde

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism

She is absolutely inadmissible into society. Many a woman has a past, but I am told that she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit
Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.

There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose

Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her look like a public building

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!

A:You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none.

J: That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.
A:Yes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time.

I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone

To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, maybe regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

(from The Importance of Being Ernest)

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humour in the woman.


The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral
The fact is, you have fallen lately, Cecily, into a bad habit of thinking for yourself. You should give it up. It is not quite womanly.... Men don't like it

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.(O.W)

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.(O.W.)


When I was young I used to think that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old, I know it is.(O.W.)

The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.(O.W.)

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.(O.W.)

honorary monumen of Oscar Wilde in Paris (Pére-Lachaise Cemetery)






(27.08.2007, Paris)

Some of quotations from Oscar Wilde

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

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

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."

"America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up."

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

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

"At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets."

"Biography lends to death a new terror."

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

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

"Genius is born - not paid."

"I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones."

"I am not young enough to know everything."

"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability."

"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."

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."

"Illusion is the first of all pleasures."

"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information."

"It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal."

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