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Oscar Wilde Quotes (1854-1900)
Poet, Novelist
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About Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 β 30 November 1900) was an Irish dramatist, essayist, novelist and poet.
Best Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Oscar Wilde quotes.
βExperience, the name men give to their mistakes.β
βThe supreme vice is shallowness.β
βOnly the shallow know themselves.β
βPatriotism is the vice of nations.β
Oscar Wilde Quotes by Topic
Find exactly what you are looking for by browsing this categorized list of Oscar Wilde quotes by topic.
Oscar Wilde on Love 9 quotes
View all 9 quotes on Love →Oscar Wilde on Journalism 9 quotes
βIn America the president reigns for four years, and journalism governs forever and ever.β
Oscar Wilde on Hedonism 4 quotes
βThe senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.β
Oscar Wilde on Education 4 quotes
βWe live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.β
Oscar Wilde on Dreams 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Dreams →Oscar Wilde on Censorship 3 quotes
βAn idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.β
Oscar Wilde on Perfection 3 quotes
βWhat Jesus does say is that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is.β
Oscar Wilde on Individualism 3 quotes
βArt is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.β
Oscar Wilde on Time 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Time →Oscar Wilde on Stupidity 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Stupidity →Oscar Wilde on Ambition 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Ambition →Oscar Wilde on Failure 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Failure →What Oscar Wilde Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Oscar Wilde shared regarding contemporaries.
Oscar Wilde on Women 7 quotes
βOh! no one. No one in particular. A woman of no importance.β
Oscar Wilde on Frank Harris 2 quotes
βFrank Harris has no feelings. It is the secret of his success. Just as the fact that he thinks other people have none either is the secret of the failure that lies in wait for him somewhere on the way of Life.β
Oscar Wilde on Rudyard Kipling 2 quotes
βAs one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes.β
Oscar Wilde on Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Oscar Wilde on Adam Silvera
Oscar Wilde on Mothers
Oscar Wilde on Jefferson Davis
βThe principles for which Jefferson Davis and the South went to war cannot suffer defeat.β
Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope
Oscar Wilde on Edward Carson
βI trust he will conduct his cross-examination with all the added bitterness of an old friend.β
Oscar Wilde on William Wordsworth
βWordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.β
Oscar Wilde on Richard Wagner
Quotes About Oscar Wilde
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Oscar Wilde from others.
W. H. Auden on Oscar Wilde
Max Beerbohm on Oscar Wilde 3 quotes
βDespite the number of his books and plays, Mr. Wilde was not, I think, what one calls a born writer. His writing seemed always to be rather an overflow of intellectual temperamental energy than an inevitable, absorbing function. That he never concentrated himself on any one form of literature is a proof that the art of writing never really took hold of him.β
Ambrose Bierce on Oscar Wilde
βThat sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh. The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says itβsays it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. Therefore is the she fool enamored of the feel of his tongue in her ear to tickle her understanding. The limpid and spiritless vacuity of this intellectual jellyfish is in ludicrous contrast with the rude but robust mental activities that he came to quicken and inspire. Not only has he no thoughts, but no thinker. His lecture is mere verbal ditch-waterβmeaningless, trite and without coherence. It lacks even the nastiness that exalts and refines his verse. Moreover, it is obviously his own; he had not even the energy and independence to steal it. And so, with a knowledge that would equip and idiot to dispute with a cast-iron dog, and eloquence to qualify him for the duties of a caller on a hog-ranch, and an imagination adequate to the conception of a tom-cat, when fired by contemplation of a fiddle-string, this consummate and star-like youth, missing everywhere his heaven-appointed functions and offices, wanders about, posing as a statue of himself, and, like the sun-smitten image of Memnon, emitting meaningless murmurs in the blaze of women's eyes. He makes me tired. And this gawky gowk has the divine effrontery to link his name with those of Swinburne, Rossetti and Morrisβthis dunghill he-hen would fly with eagles. He dares to set his tongue to the honored name of Keats. He is the leader, quoth'a, of a renaissance in art, this man who cannot drawβof a revival of letters, this man who cannot write! This little and looniest of a brotherhood of simpletons, whom the wicked wits of London, haling him dazed from his obscurity, have crowned and crucified as King of the Cranks, has accepted the distinction in stupid good faith and our foolish people take him at his word. Mr. Wilde is pinnacled upon a dazzling eminence but the earth still trembles to the dull thunder of the kicks that set him up.β
Reading on Oscar Wilde
Like Chesterton on Oscar Wilde
Cesar Chavez on Oscar Wilde
βWe see these insane practices reflected in the buy-outs and takeovers on Wall Street. It's the same thing: exchanging long-term security for short-term gain. You sacrifice a company for the immediate rewards. But you destroy what produces jobs and livelihoods and economic health. If you eat the seed corn, you won't have a crop to plant. Oscar Wilde once said, "A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." We look at the price, but we don't look at the value. Economics and profit drive everything. People forget that the soil is our sustenance. It is a sacred trust. It is what has worked for us for centuries, It is what we pass on to future generations.β
G.K. Chesterton on Oscar Wilde
βThe same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.β
G. K. Chesterton on Oscar Wilde 3 quotes
βOscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.β
NoΓ«l Coward on Oscar Wilde
Franklin Dyall on Oscar Wilde
βWilde's voice was of the brown velvet order β mellifluous β rounded β in a sense giving it a plummy quality β rather on the adenotic side β but practically pure cello β and very pleasing.β
J. T. Grein on Oscar Wilde
Stuart Hampshire on Oscar Wilde
βHe had first to free English speech from its weight of serious meaning. He had to win for prose, for measured sentence and paragraph, the license that his contemporaries would concede only to verse: the freedom to delight instantly, in virtue of form alone, and the right to forestall reflection by an explosion of felicity in phrasing. He used the epigram, as a literary form, very much as a ballet-master uses exercises at the bar.β
Disputed Quotes
Quotes attributed to Oscar Wilde that are questionable.
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to Oscar Wilde
βWhy was I born with such contemporaries?β
βI'm not young enough to know everything.β
βI like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.β
About Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 β 30 November 1900) was an Irish dramatist, essayist, novelist and poet.