Oscar Wilde Quotes About Children

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

  Oscar Wilde

  Funny, Family, Sarcastic

  The Importance of Being Earnest act 1 (1895)

• The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

  Oscar Wilde

  Children, Parenting, Fortune Cookie

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.172, Wordsworth Editions

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

  Oscar Wilde

  Family, Witty, Time

  'A Woman of No Importance' (1893) act 2

• Don't be discouraged if your children reject your advice. Years later they will offer it to their own offspring.

  Oscar Wilde

  Children, Years, Advice

• Children start out loving their parents, but as they grow older and discover their parents are human, they become judgmental. And sometimes, when they mature, they forgive their parents, especially when they discover they are also human.

  Oscar Wilde

  Children, Parent, Forgiving

• Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. ... For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.

  Oscar Wilde

  Sad, Stars, Pain

• Schools should be the most beautiful place in every town and village-so beautiful that the punishment for undutiful children should be barred from going to school the following day.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Education, Children

• In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.

  Oscar Wilde

  Love, Strong, Children

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.250, Wordsworth Editions

• Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

  Oscar Wilde

  Fashion, Children, Parent

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “Aphorisms”, p.19, Oscar Wilde

• A burnt child loves the fire.

  Oscar Wilde

  Children, Fire, Children Love

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.454, Oxford University Press on Demand

• A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Mother, Pain

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.36, GENERAL PRESS

• When a golden girl can win Prayer from out the lips of sin, When the barren almond bears, And a little child gives away its tears, Then shall all the house be still And peace come to Canterville.

  Oscar Wilde

  Girl, Prayer, Children

  Oscar Wilde (2012). “The Canterville Ghost and Other Stories”, p.17, Courier Corporation

• Give children beauty, not the record of bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls, as they call history, or of the latitude and longitude of places nobody cares to visit, as they call geography.

  Oscar Wilde

  Children, Giving, Records

  Oscar Wilde (2012). “The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde”, p.159, Courier Corporation

• Children have a natural antipathy to books- handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous.

  Oscar Wilde

  Girl, Education, Children

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.11, University of Chicago Press

• The Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.

  Oscar Wilde

  Children, Mean, Men

  Oscar Wilde (1988). “The complete plays”, Methuen Drama

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