Oscar Wilde quotes, poems, and sayings about love, life will add some wit to your day.
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde born on 16 October 1854 was an Irish poet and playwright. He was famous for his epigrams and plats and some of his famous novels include The Importance of Being Earnest’ and ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray‘.
Most of Wilde’s plays were satirical comedies and those plays made fun of Victorian society, London’s social hierarchy. Quite a dramatic leader in promoting the Aestheticism movement, Wilde advocated freedom from moral restraint and the limitations of society. His work created controversies and was way ahead of that time.
Oscar Wilde lived a rich life, got married to Constance Lloyd, became a father, and had a love affair with a young man named Alfred Douglas. Even though he was mainly famous for his work but his vibrant style and the infamous imprisonment for his homosexuality also attracted attention in his career.
Here we are sharing some of the best Oscar Wilde quotes, poems, and sayings on love, life collected from various sources.
Oscar Wilde Quotes And Poems
“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde
“I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do – the day after.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Who, being loved, is poor?”
― Oscar Wilde
“Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.”
― Oscar Wilde
“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”
― Oscar Wilde
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde
“One should always be in love. That’s the reason one should never marry.”
― Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde Quotes And Poems About Life
“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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
“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.”
― Oscar Wilde
“I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.”
― Oscar Wilde
“The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
The Picture Of Dorian Gray Quotes By Oscar Wilde
“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde Love Quotes And Poems
“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
― Oscar Wilde
“I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.”
― Oscar Wilde
“I can resist anything except temptation.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
― Oscar Wilde
“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
― Oscar Wilde
“I am not young enough to know everything.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
― Oscar Wilde
Best Oscar Wilde Quotes And Poems
“Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.”
― Oscar Wilde
“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
― Oscar Wilde
“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”
― Oscar Wilde
“There is no sin except stupidity.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”
― Oscar Wilde, Salomé
“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
― Oscar Wilde
“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”
― Oscar Wilde
“A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.”
― Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde Funny Quotes And Poems
“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Hearts are made to be broken.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
“You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”
― oscar Wilde
“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
― Oscar Wilde
“I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”
― Oscar Wilde
“The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.”
― Oscar Wilde
“They’ve promised that dreams can come true – but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”
― Oscar Wilde
“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
― Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde Famous Quotes And Sayings
“I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde
“The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.”
― Oscar Wilde
“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and Selected Critical Prose
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
“Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde Poems About Nature, Death
“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being”
― Oscar Wilde
“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
“Some things are more precious because they don’t last long.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.”
― Oscar Wilde
“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with the company.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
― Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde Quotations
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“In this world, there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
― Oscar Wilde
“What of Art?
-It is a malady.
–Love?
-An Illusion.
–Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
–You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
–What are you?
-To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won’t be invited to cocktail parties.”
― Oscar Wilde
“A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
“Paradoxically though it may seem, it is nonetheless true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.”
― Oscar Wilde
“The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.”
― Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde Quotes From His Famous Books
“One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.”
― Oscar Wilde
“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.”
― Oscar Wilde
“It takes a great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
“I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.”
― Oscar Wilde
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Did you like these Oscar Wilde quotes?
If you are a huge fan of quotes then you have already read his name or some of Oscar Wilde’s quotes here and there. Even though he struggled at the end and died in poverty, Wilde’s work had inspired many and continues to do so. He lived an extravagant and rich life and motivated others to follow their heart.
We hope these Oscar Wilde quotes and poems on love and life will inspire you to follow your heart without being afraid of the consequences.
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