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Oscar Wilde -
Life
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146 Sourced Quotes
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Ah! somehow life is bigger after all
Than any painted angel could we see
The God that is within us!
Oscar Wilde
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To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life.
Oscar Wilde
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An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.
Oscar Wilde
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Ah, on what little things does happiness depend! I have read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for want of a red rose is my life made wretched.
Oscar Wilde
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Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Oscar Wilde
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You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing.
Oscar Wilde
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Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
Oscar Wilde
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To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
Oscar Wilde
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Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
Oscar Wilde
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A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacrifice to me, a useless sacrifice.
Oscar Wilde
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Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.
Oscar Wilde
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Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile.
Oscar Wilde
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In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.
Oscar Wilde
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Life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.
Oscar Wilde
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The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
Oscar Wilde
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In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.
Oscar Wilde
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When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
Oscar Wilde
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I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.
Oscar Wilde
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Paradox though it may seem—and paradoxes are always dangerous things—it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.
Oscar Wilde
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Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.
Oscar Wilde
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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 warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.
Oscar Wilde
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There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
Oscar Wilde
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To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.
Oscar Wilde
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Do you want to know the great drama of my life? It's that I have put my genius into my life; all I've put into my works is my talent.
Oscar Wilde
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The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself.
Oscar Wilde
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Quote of the day
Guilt is anger directed at ourselves - at what we did or did not do. Resentment is anger directed at others - at what they did or did not do.
Peter McWilliams
Oscar Wilde
Creative Commons
Born:
October 16, 1854
Died:
November 30, 1900
(aged 46)
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