Quotes from Oscar Wilde

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

Writing bores me so.

I am a man of simple pleasures. The best suits me perfectly.

The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in man That wastes and withers there.

There is no such thing as a heterosexual male, only men who haven't met Oscar Wilde yet.

It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it

The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical.

The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.

Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it

When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.

The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.

Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.

And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive.

Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.