Quotes from Oscar Wilde

As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude.

Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.

Set in this stormy Northern sea, Queen of these restless fields of tide, England! what shall men say of thee, Before whose feet the worlds divide?

To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.

The mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.

It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.

The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.

Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

but the bravest man among us is afraid of himself

The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations.

When a man does exactly what a woman expects him to do she doesn't think much of him. One should always do what a woman doesn't expect, just as one should say what she doesn't understand.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Cultivated leisure is the aim of man.

There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.

...but I assure you that there are moments when Art almost attains to the dignity of manual labor.

Ah! my dear Count, life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.