Funny Oscar Wilde Quotes
These funny Oscar Wilde quotes represent some of the author’s best and most notable sayings and quips.
Famous and funny Oscar Wilde quotes
The Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) knew well the art of turning a phrase.
He used his wry and cutting wit to dissect preconceived notions and social norms, exposing the realities of life with a twist of sarcasm and humor.
Wilde often made his point with an unexpected twist. He once admitted, “I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”
Best funny Oscar Wilde quotes
Here are ten of our favorite humorous sayings from the pen of the famous playwright.
1.) Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
Oscar Wilde
2.) A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.
Oscar Wilde
3.) Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.
Oscar Wilde
4.) Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won’t be invited to cocktail parties.
Oscar Wilde
5.) Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.
Oscar Wilde
6.) I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
Oscar Wilde
7.) There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde
8.) Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.
Oscar Wilde
9.) Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
Oscar Wilde
Funny Oscar Wilde quotes about love
10.) To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
11.) I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.
12.) 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.
13.) Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.
14.) A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
15.) Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
16.) 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.
Marriage humor
17.) Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
18.) One should always be in love. That’s the reason one should never marry.
19.) Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
20.) There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose.
Relationships
21.) Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
22.) I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.
23.) The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
24.) The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
25.) Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.
Friendship
26.) I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.
27.) A good friend will always stab you in the front.
28.) I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
29.) Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.
30.) I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
31.) He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
32.) Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.
Oscar Wilde is best known for:
- His biting wit and turn of a phrase.
- Funny epigrams – a pithy saying or remark expressing an idea or thought.
- Dressing flamboyantly.
- Being a brilliant and nimble conversationalist.
- Espousing aestheticism, an art movement heralding “art for art’s sake” or beauty over purpose.
- He published his only novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in 1890.
- By the early 1890s he became one of London’s most popular playwrights.
- He wrote many successful plays, including “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
- His imprisonment for “indecency” in 1895.
Oscar Wilde sarcasm
33.) A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
34.) People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it’s impossible to count them accurately.
35.) When good Americans die, they go to Paris.
36.) You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
37.) I have nothing to declare except my genius.
Short humorous sayings
38.) No good deed goes unpunished.
39.) The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
40.) Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
41.) Hearts are made to be broken.
42.) Only the shallow know themselves.
43.) I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
44.) To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
45.) The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.
46.) We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
47.) Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
48.) The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
49.) Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.
50.) This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.
51.) Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
52.) Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
Funny Oscar Wilde quotes about life
53.) Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
54.) We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
55.) I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.
56.) My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s.
57.) Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
Work
58.) Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.
Family
59.) Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
60.) After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.
61.) To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Funny Oscar Wilde quotes about society
62.) The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.
63.) America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
64.) The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
65.) There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.
66.) It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
67.) Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
Youth
68.) To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
69.) I am not young enough to know everything.
70.) When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.
Funny aging quotes for birthday cards.
Beauty
71.) A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.
72.) Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
73.) It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But… it is better to be good than to be ugly.
Woman
74.) I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
75.) Every woman is a rebel.
76.) Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.
77.) One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.
78.) All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.
79.) Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
Drinking
80.) I drink to separate my body from my soul.
81.) Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
Moderation
82.) Everything in moderation, including moderation.
83.) Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Funny Oscar Wilde quotes about education
84.) Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
85.) If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.
86.) There is no sin except stupidity.
87.) There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
88.) You can never be overdressed or overeducated.
89.) Life is too short to learn German.
90.) The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
91.) Irony is wasted on the stupid.
92.) If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
Books and reading
93.) It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
94.) I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
Funny Oscar Wilde quotes about art
95.) Music makes one feel so romantic — at least it always gets on one’s nerves — which is the same thing nowadays.
96.) Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
97.) In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
Creativity
98.) Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.
99.) Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
More famous creativity quotes and sayings.
Dreams
100.) They’ve promised that dreams can come true – but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
Oscar Wilde’s good advice and wisdom
101.) The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself.
102.) There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
103.) If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
104.) If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.
105.) Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
106.) A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.
107.) I don’t say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could.
108.) A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
109.) Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions. Their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Desire and temptation
110.) In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
111.) I can resist anything except temptation.
112.) We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
113.) The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.
114.) If you don’t get everything you want, think of the things you don’t get that you don’t want.
115.) I’m a man of simple tastes. I’m always satisfied with the best.
Happiness
116.) Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
117.) 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?
118.) With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?
119.) The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
120.) I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do — the day after.
121.) 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.
Funny Oscar Wilde quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray
122.) You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
123.) 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.
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Thank you for reading these funny Oscar Wilde quotes and sayings. You might also enjoy these quote pages:
By Greg Johnson | Published 7/19/2021
