Oscar Wilde People Quotations

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.

London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

One can always be kind to people one cares nothing about.

None of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

Philanthropy is the refuge of rich people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures.

Philanthropy seems to me to have become simply the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating; people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

I don't want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that, and I never pay mine.

Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever written in my life. Strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?

I was disappointed in Niagara -- most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.

Some of these people need ten years of therapy -ten sentences of mine do not equal ten years of therapy.

People who love only once in their lives are. . . shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Vulgarity is the conduct of other people, just as falsehoods are the truths of other people

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attraction of others.

Work is a refuge of people who have nothing better to do.

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.

What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with any woman so long as he doesn't love her

What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

To get into the best society nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people

To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders...It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately

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

If there is anything in the world more annoying than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.

Ah! Don't say you agree with me. When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.

It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one, behind one's back, that are absolutely and entirely true.

When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.

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

Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.

I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.

Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?

Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.

The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married.

The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.

If people are dishonest once, they will be dishonest a second time. And honest people should keep away from them. (Lady Chiltern)

If we're always guided by other people's thoughts, what's the point in having our own?

The people who have adored me-- there have not been very many, but there have been some-- have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.

Yes, very sensible... People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.

Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.

What a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed Lord Henry. "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.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left. ALGERNON: We have. JACK: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about? ALGERNON: The fools? Oh! about the clever people of course. JACK: What fools.

Most people are boring and stupid.

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

It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then only at dinner parties.

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.

Personally, I have a great admiration for stupidity.

Without order nothing can exist-without chaos nothing can evolve. Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

Flowers are as common in the country as people are in London.

Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile.

I can't stand people that do not take food seriously.

Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization.

People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.

I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.

People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.

If people were meant to be nude, they would have been born this way.

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.

We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.

Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.

I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.

To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all!

I quite agree with Dr. Nordau's assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.

You can't possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It's absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.

Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving invitations.

I like looking at geniuses and listening to beautiful people.

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.

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.

I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.

Most people are other people.

If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you.

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.