Andy Hickman's Reviews > Oscar Wilde's Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations

Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations, by 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.”

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

“When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.”

“I don’t desire to change anything in England except the weather.”

“I only care to see doctors when I am in perfect health; then they comfort one, but when one is ill they are most depressing.”

“You believe good of everyone, Jane. It is a great fault.”

“It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is, no doubt, the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.”

“Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.”
"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."

Other examples:
Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life.

I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.

Life cannot be written. Life can only be lived.

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.

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

I like men who have a future and women who have a past.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

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

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

He hasn't a single redeeming vice.

I can resist everything except temptation.

Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.

It is the confession, not the priest that gives us absolution.

Most religious teachers spend their time trying to prove the unproven by the unprovable.

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

No great artist sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist.

The only portraits in which one believes are portraits where there is very little of the sitter and a very great deal of the artist.

Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

I hate people who talk about themselves, as you do, when one wants to talk about oneself, as I do.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
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