Quotes from Oscar Wilde

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

She...can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious

When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.

Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.

I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.

How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?

I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.

A kiss may ruin a human life

I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.

If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.

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.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.

When good Americans die, they go to Paris'. 'Where do bad Americans go?' 'They stay in America'.

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.