Oscar Wilde
224 quotations
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.
A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.
Morality is the attitude we adopt toward people whom we personally dislike.
There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.
The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.
No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.
For his mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
A pessimist is one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.
In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.
A poet can survive anything but a misprint.
In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.