Oscar Wilde Quotes About Duty

• The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

  Oscar Wilde

  History, Duty

  1891 Intentions, 'The Critic as Artist'.

• On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

  Oscar Wilde

  Funny, Mind, Criticism

  'The Importance of Being Earnest' (1895) act 2

• Dammit Sir, it's your duty to get married. You can't always be living for pleasure!

  Oscar Wilde

  Funny, Marriage, Married

• The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

  Oscar Wilde

  Life, Firsts, Duty

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.120, Wordsworth Editions

• If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

  Oscar Wilde

  Music, Conversation, Duty

  1891 The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch.4.

• Duty is what one expects from others.

  Oscar Wilde

  Responsibility, Ethics, Duty

  Oscar Wilde, Peter Raby (2008). “The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays: Lady Windermere's Fan; Salome; A Woman of No Importance; An Ideal Husband; The Importance of Being Earnest”, p.127, Oxford Paperbacks

• Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

  Oscar Wilde

  Writing, Fiction, Painful

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.740, GENERAL PRESS

• JACK Your duty as a gentleman calls you back. ALGERNON My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.

  Oscar Wilde

  Gentleman, Degrees, Pleasure

  Oscar Wilde (1994). “The Importance of Being Earnest”, p.38, Heinemann

• What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Lying, Duty

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “Oscar Wilde The Dover Reader”, p.447, Courier Dover Publications

• If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.

  Oscar Wilde

  Unbearable, Rich, Pleasure

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “Miscellaneous Aphorisms: The Soul of Man”, p.52, Simon and Schuster

• What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one's death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That's all that can be said about land.

  Oscar Wilde

  Home, Land, Giving

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “The Importance of Being Earnest: Revised Edition”, p.27, Bloomsbury Publishing

• And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive.

  Oscar Wilde

  Men, Doe, Importance Of Being Earnest

  Oscar Wilde (1994). “The Importance of Being Earnest”, p.44, Heinemann

• Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.

  Oscar Wilde

  Men, Vices, Done

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.101, Oxford University Press on Demand

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