Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wildewas an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 October 1854
CityDublin, Ireland
CountryIreland
Time is a waste of money.
People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.
Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.
The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.
Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old.
Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile.
My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.
Where there is no extravagance there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.
To get back to my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable
What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
The only way a woman can ever reform her husband is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life
The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.
Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.