Lady Windermere's Fan Quotes

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“I can resist anything except temptation.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“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.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Misfortunes one can endure--they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah!--there is the sting of life.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly!

You didn't know it then-you know it now.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“I like talking to a brick wall- it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Love is easily killed.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Experience is a question of instinct about life.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“How long could you love a woman who didn't love you, Cecil?
A woman who didn't love me? Oh, all my life!”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Good heavens! how marriage ruins a man! It's as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They’re the only things we can pay.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“I don't like compliments and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.”
― Oscar Wilde , Lady Windermere's Fan

“I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip.
What is the difference between scandal and gossip?
Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“I find I have, and a heart doesn’t suit me, Windermere. Somehow it doesn’t go with modern dress. It makes one look old.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan