Emerson > Emerson's Quotes

“A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”
― 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

“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.”
― 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

“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

“A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Critic As Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything

“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious”
― Oscar Wilde

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -- these are the two things that govern us.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Stories

“The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Irony is wasted on the stupid”
― Oscar Wilde

“I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Each man kills the thing he loves.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol