Oscar Wilde - Life Quotes

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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
There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

Oscar Wilde
Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Oscar Wilde
Life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

Oscar Wilde
When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realize that the one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action. He, indeed, knows neither the origin of his deeds nor their results.

Oscar Wilde
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
Lord Illingworth: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.
Mrs. Allonby: It ends with Revelations.

Oscar Wilde
Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before.

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

Oscar Wilde
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
Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failures.

Oscar Wilde
Requiescat Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust. Lily-like, white as snow, She hardly knew She was a woman, so Sweetly she grew. Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast, I vex my heart alone She is at rest. Peace, Peace, she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet, All my life's buried here, Heap earth upon it.

Oscar Wilde
In married life, three is company, and two is none.

Oscar Wilde
A woman's life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses.

Oscar Wilde
God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.

Oscar Wilde
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. Mothers are different. Mothers are darlings.

Oscar Wilde
For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.

Oscar Wilde
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
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
We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in Art.

Oscar Wilde
Misfortunes one can endure - they come from the outside; they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults - ah, there is the sting of life.

Oscar Wilde
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
Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.

Oscar Wilde
Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.

Oscar Wilde
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

Oscar Wilde
One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.

Oscar Wilde
The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself.

Oscar Wilde
How long could you love a woman who didn't love you, Cecil? A woman who didn't love me? Oh, all my life!

Oscar Wilde
I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you. But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.

Oscar Wilde