Oscar Wilde Quotes

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar and often convincing.

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

It is sweet to dance to violins When Love and Life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!

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.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.

It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.

Beauty is a form of Genius — is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb a the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.

The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in man That wastes and withers there; Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate And the Warder is Despair.