Oscar Quotes

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

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

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

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.

You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.

A good friend will always stab you in the front.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

I am not young enough to know everything.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Hearts are made to be broken.

You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.

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.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?

To define is to limit.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

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

I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

I can resist anything except temptation.

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.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

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.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

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

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

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

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

Who, being loved, is poor?

Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

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.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

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

We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.

Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

No good deed goes unpunished.

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

What of Art? -It is a malady. --Love? -An Illusion. --Religion? -The fashionable substitute for Belief. --You are a sceptic. -Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith. --What are you? -To define is to limit.

Some things are more precious because they don't last long.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard Some do it with a bitter look Some with a flattering word The coward does it with a kiss The brave man with a sword

The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.

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

We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

Every woman is a rebel.

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

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

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being

If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.

The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

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

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.

I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

There is no sin except stupidity.

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?