Dublin, Ireland

Here’s a hearty and happy St. Patrick’s Day to friends far and near. Few better ways to mark the day, methinks, than with a selection of quotables by the eminent Irish writer, poet, and aesthete Oscar (Fingal O’Flahertie Wills) Wilde…

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude.
It makes the whole world kin.

If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.

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

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

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.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

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

All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Always forgive your enemies—nothing annoys them so much.

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

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Children begin by loving their parents;
after a time they judge them; 
rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

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

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

One should always be in love.
That is the reason one should never marry.

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

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

Who, being loved, is poor?