Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms thoughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal convinction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials," imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.
Below, find the best quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest with their corresponding chapter numbers or act numbers!
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
- Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
- The Preface
- For there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
- Chapter 1
- But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.
- Chapter 1
- The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
- Chapter 2
- Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
- Chapter 2
- Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
- Chapter 2
- 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.
- Chapter 2
- Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
- Chapter 3
- Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different.
- Chapter 3
- 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.
- Chapter 3
- I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
- Chapter 3
- Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
- Chapter 4
- Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
- Chapter 4
- When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
- Chapter 4
- Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
- Chapter 4
- Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
- Chapter 5
- You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.
- Chapter 6
- I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.
- Chapter 9
- When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
- Chapter 15
- To define is to limit.
- Chapter 17
- Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
- Chapter 19
- The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
- Chapter 19
The Importance of Being Earnest (1894)
- I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If I ever get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.
- Act 1
- Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
- Act 1
- The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
- Act 1
- Yes, but you must be serious about it. I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.
- Act 1
- Miss Fairfax, ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl . . . I have ever met since . . . I met you.
- Act 1
- To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
- Act 1
- You always want to argue things. / That is exactly what things were originally made for.
- Act 1
- All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.
- Act 1
- I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever now-a-days.
- Act 1
- My dear fellow, the truth isn't quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice sweet refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!
- Act 1
- I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister. / Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.
- Act 1
- The world is good enough for me. / Yes, but are you good enough for it?
- Act 2
- Oh, I don't think I would care to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.
- Act 2
- If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.
- Act 2
- I hope I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.
- Act 2
- I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.
- Act 2
- How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless. / Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.
- Act 2
- In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.
- Act 3
- Never speak disrespectfully of Society. Only people who can't get into it do that.
- Act 3
- Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating . . .
- Act 3
- I never change, except in my affections.
- Act 3
- Ernest! My own Ernest! I felt from the first that you could have no other name! / Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me? / I can. For I feel that you are sure to change.
- Act 3
- I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.
- Act 3
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