The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.
Author
Oscar Wilde
140 quotations
About Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish author, poet and playwright. After writing in different literary styles throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular and influential dramatists in London in the early 1890s. He was a key figure in the emerging Aestheticism movement of the late 19th century and is widely regarded the greatest playwright of the Victorian era. Wilde is best known for his Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), his epigrams, plays and bedtime sto…
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Oscar WildeA man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
Men marry because they are tired women, because they are curious both are disappointed.
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.
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I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Women are made to be loved, not understood.
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Children begin by loving their parents after a time they judge them rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.
Success is a science if you have the conditions, you get the result.
Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.