Oscar Wilde Being Quotations

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.

Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade. Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.

I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.

Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.

Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.

A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.

Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.

Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs.

I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.

My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produces false impression

He wants to enslave you.' 'I shudder at the thought of being free.

I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice.

He is fond of being misunderstood. It gives him a post of vantage.

Alone, and without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.

Ones real life is often the life that one does not lead.

I live in terror of not being misunderstood.

Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.

My great mistake, the fault for which I can’t forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.

Freedom, individualism and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.

It is awfully hard work doing nothing.

More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn't read.

What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one's death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That's all that can be said about land.

Every thing to be true must become a religion.

I live constantly in the fear of not being misunderstood.

Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.

Be yourself, because others are already taken.

And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive.

Be yourself; everyone else is taken.