Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Teachers, Education, Society
It is far better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Money
I never saw a man who looked with such a wistful eye upon that little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Nature
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
—Oscar Wilde
To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.
—Oscar Wilde
I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Integrity
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Old Age, Age, Aging
How pleasant it was in the garden! And how delightful other people’s emotions were!—much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. One’s own soul, and the passions of one’s friends—those were the fascinating things in life. He pictured to himself with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had missed by staying so long with Basil Hallward. Had be gone to his aunt’s, he would have been sure to have met Lord Goodbody there, and the whole conversation would have been about the feeding of the poor and the necessity for model lodging-houses. Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour. It was charming to have escaped all that!
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Hypocrisy
One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Life
I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Talent, How to Live, Genius, Work
When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Liberty
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: People, Virtues, Charm
We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Language
Life would be dull without them.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Mistakes
In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Art
The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Education
All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Charm
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Literature, Books
A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude.
—Oscar Wilde
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Poor, Money
Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Marriage
Music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual. It is through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate impression itself.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Music
A kiss may ruin a human life.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Kiss, Kissing, Kisses
Everything popular is wrong.
—Oscar Wilde
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Parents, Children
You now what a woman’s curiosity is. Almost as great as a man’s!
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: One liners, Curiosity
One should always be a little improbable.
—Oscar Wilde
A man’s very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Honesty
The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Critics, Criticism
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Ideas, Danger
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Sheridan Le Fanu Irish Novelist
- Jonathan Swift Irish Satirist
- Brendan Behan Irish Poet
- William Butler Yeats Irish Poet
- James Joyce Irish Novelist
- Oliver Goldsmith Anglo-Irish Novelist, Poet
- George William Russell Irish Author
- Elizabeth Bowen Irish Novelist
- George Bernard Shaw Irish Playwright
- Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington Irish Novelist
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