Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 – 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright.
1862. There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.
1862. No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
1863. Men become old, but they never become good.
1864. I sometimes think that God in creating man, somewhat overestimated His ability.
1865. A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.
1866. Men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.
1867. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.
1868. A bad man is the sort of man who admires innocence, and a bad woman is the sort of woman a man never gets tired of.
1817. Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.
1818. The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
1819. It is only very ugly or very beautiful women who ever hide their faces.
1820. Women give to men the very gold of their lives. But they invariably want it back in small change.
1821. Women have a wonderful instinct about everything. They can discover everything except the obvious.
1822. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
1823. Wicked women bother one. Good women bore one. That is the only difference between them.
1711. It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.
1712. American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.
1713. The one charm of the past is that it is past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.
1714. Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon not punishment, is their mission.
1715. Women are the most reliable as they have no memory for the important.
1716. There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is.
1717. Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as Humanity treats its Gods. They worship us and are always asking us to do something for them.
1663. Thirty-five is a very attractive age, London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
1664. Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrender.
1665. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
1666. Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our own gigantic intellects.
1667. I don’t believe in women thinking too much. Women should think in moderation, as they should do all things in moderation.
1668. She looks like a woman with a past. Most pretty women do.
1669. Women have no appreciation of good looks; at least good women have not.
1612. Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.
1613. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.
1614. I don’t know that women are always rewarded for being charming. I think they are usually punished for it!
1615. Good women have such limited views of life, their horizon is so small, their interests are so petty.
1616. She’ll never love you unless you are always at her heels; women like to be bothered.
1617. A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.
1618. Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never have time. They are always so occupied in being jealous of other people’s husbands.
1570. Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.
1571. We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
1572. But the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
1573. One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything except a good reputation.
1574. Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
1575. One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything.
1576. It is perfectly brutal the way most women nowadays behave to men who are not their husbands.
1506. The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
1507. The Book of Life begins with a man and woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations.
1508. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
1509. To become a spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life.
1510. One can live for years sometimes without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into one single hour.
1511. Give me the luxuries, and anyone can have the necessaries.
1512. It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has never been able to find its way.
1513. We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and thinks too much to be beautiful.
212. Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
213. Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
214. Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
215. One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
216. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
217. Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.
218. The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
219. A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
