When we talk of sarcasm and wit, everyone would agree that Oscar Wilde should also enter the conversation. His words are merciless, like the weather in Dublin, where he was born.
His poems and plays are not just sarcastic but painfully honest and true. And the most surprising part isn’t that we all still quote Oscar Wilde (over 100 years later) but that his quotes are disappointingly accurate even nowadays.
Knowing all that, I was curious to see if I could collect his best (or worst) visions of life and love and present them in a special post for you. Well, you are on it right now.
Today, I give you 50 fiercely row, and ironical Oscar Wilde quotes on love and relationships. Enjoy. Shake your head if needed. Share if you like them.
Oscar Wilde Quotes
1. “Love! What is love? It’s nothing. It’s just a word. It doesn’t exist. Only pleasure is important.”
2. “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”
3. “She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.”
Oscar Wilde
4. “A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.”
5. “One should always be in love. That’s the reason one should never marry.”
6. “Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays.”
7. “I don’t say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could”
8. “I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them to be real.”
9. “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.”
10. “Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”
11. “The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.”
12. “If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”
Best Oscar Wilde Quotes on Love
13 “I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”
14. “Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed.
He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.
People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion – these are the two things that govern us.”
Oscar Wilde
15. “One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.”
16. “Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”
17. “She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.”
18. “With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”
19. “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”
20. “I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
21. “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
22. “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
23. “Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.”
24. “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.”
25. “After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”
Quotes on Love and Relationships | Oscar Wilde
26. “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”
27. “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.”
28. “Men always want to be a woman’s, first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We, women, have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.”
29. “One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.”
30. “Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.”
31. “Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”
32. “We women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes…”
33. “She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.”
34. “Between men and women, there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.”
35. “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.”
Oscar Wilde
36. “One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.”
37. “Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.”
38. “A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.”
Sarcastic Oscar Wilde Quotes About Love
39. “They get up early because they have so much to do and go to bed early because they have so little to think about.”
40. “Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
41. “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 all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.”
Oscar Wilde
42. “Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women…merely adored.”
43. “Man is many things, but he is not rational.”
44. “As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.”
45. “A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.”
46. “Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.”
47. “I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women, when they love, give everything.”
48. “A kiss may ruin a human life.”
49. “Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.”
50. “Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.”
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