Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.

I was disappointed with Niagara—most people must be disappointed with Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

Misfortunes one can endure — they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults — ah! there is the sting of life.

Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.

Bigamy is having one husband or wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.

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

The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself.

Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.

Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes.

[T]he recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.

I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.

You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things...I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas

One's only real life is the life one never leads.