Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise for which we are later, in the fullness of time and understanding, very grateful for!

I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.

To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.

Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off... p 207

We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.

For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.