Quote

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

Oscar Wilde

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Oscar Wilde
Age: 46 †
Born: 1854
Born: October 16
Died: 1900
Died: November 30
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Oscar O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Discovered
Duty
Second
Possible
Firsts
First
Life
Artificial

More quotes by Oscar Wilde

Image
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .
Oscar Wilde
Image
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
Oscar Wilde
Image
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Biography lends to death a new terror.
Oscar Wilde
Image
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Image
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.
Oscar Wilde
Image
It's the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Oscar Wilde
Image
When good Americans die, they go to Paris Where do bad Americans go? They stay in America
Oscar Wilde
Image
[on his deathbed in a Paris hotel room] Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.
Oscar Wilde
Image
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Art persists, it timelessly continues.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Really, if the lower orders don't set a good example, what on earth is the use of them?
Oscar Wilde
Image
To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.
Oscar Wilde
Image
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market place of any single thing.
Oscar Wilde
Image
But what world says that [I'm wicked]? It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.
Oscar Wilde
Image
On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.
Oscar Wilde
Image
There can be nothing more frequent than an occasional drink.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
Oscar Wilde