To be honest, Oscar Wilde isn't 1 of my favourite writers, simply because I haven't read anything by him except quotes. Yet, with sensitivity, insight, intelligence, wit and humour, the ability to know truth and to express simply and beautifully, he's 1 of the persons that I quote most often.
Therefore today, I'd like to publish here some of my favourite quotes by Oscar Wilde.
“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”
“I can resist anything except temptation.”
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
“Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.”
“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
“Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.”
“The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.”
“To define is to limit.”
“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.”
“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”
“There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.”
“Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.”
“I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after.”
“Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”
“I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.”
“A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.”
“Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.”
“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.”
“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”
“Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”
“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.”
“They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.”
“If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.”
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” - this one is true to me :)
ReplyDeleteHowever, with me, "talks" should be replaced with "acts"...