These 50 Oscar Wilde quotes will inspire you to get up and take action, his life taught us to work hard and to chase after our passions. Oscar Wilde was an interesting man who was an Irish poet, and a playwright. Oscar Wilde was born on the 16th October 1854, lived until 30th November 1900. He was a famous writer and wrote in different forms throughout the 1880s, with time he became the most famous playwriter of all time, based in London, in the early 1890s.

50 Oscar Wilde Quotes
- “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Oscar Wilde
- “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” Oscar Wilde
- “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” Oscar Wilde
- “Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.” Oscar Wilde
- “Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.” Oscar Wilde
- “We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.” Oscar Wilde
- “To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.” Oscar Wilde
- “Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.” Oscar Wilde
- “What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.” Oscar Wilde
- “Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.” Oscar Wilde
- “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Oscar Wilde
- “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.” Oscar Wilde
- “Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.” Oscar Wilde
- “You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes or their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.” Oscar Wilde
- “The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.” Oscar Wilde
- “There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.”Oscar Wilde
- “I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.” Oscar Wilde
- “I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.” Oscar Wilde
- “Live life with no excuses and travel with no regret.” Oscar Wilde
- “I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.” Oscar Wilde
- “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” Oscar Wilde
- “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” Oscar Wilde
- “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde
- “I am not young enough to know everything.” Oscar Wilde
- “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” Oscar Wilde
- “True love suffers and is silent. I remember myself once — But it is no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.” Oscar Wilde
- “Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” Oscar Wilde
- “A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.” Oscar Wilde
- “The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.” Oscar Wilde
- “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.” Oscar Wilde
- “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” Oscar Wilde
- “One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.” Oscar Wilde
- “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” Oscar Wilde
- “A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.” Oscar Wilde
- “Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us.” Oscar Wilde
- “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.” Oscar Wilde
- “Hearts are made to be broken.” Oscar Wilde
- “No good deed goes unpunished.” Oscar Wilde
- “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.” Oscar Wilde
- “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.” Oscar Wilde
- “Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” Oscar Wilde
- “Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.” Oscar Wilde
- “I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” Oscar Wilde
- “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” Oscar Wilde
- “It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection.” Oscar Wilde
- “The very essence of romance is uncertainty.” Oscar Wilde
- “Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.” Oscar Wilde
- “I don’t say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could.” Oscar Wilde
- “I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.” Oscar Wilde
- “Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.” Oscar Wilde