Oscar Wilde - Life Quotes

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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
You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to every one as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn't Ernest.

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
The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.

Oscar Wilde
Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.

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
The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.

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
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
To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life.

Oscar Wilde
Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate.

Oscar Wilde
And thus we rust Life's iron chain
Degraded and alone:
And some men curse, and some men weep,
And some men make no moan:
But God's eternal Laws are kind
And break the heart of stone

Oscar Wilde
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
Human life—that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.

Oscar Wilde
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
The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one's own perfection, to make one's every dream a reality.

Oscar Wilde
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
Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.

Oscar Wilde
I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

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

Oscar Wilde
I am sorry my life is so marred and maimed by extravagance. But I cannot live otherwise. I, at any rate, pay the penalty of suffering.

Oscar Wilde
Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any
conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into
weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the
ideal at all you must not strip it of vitality. You must find it in life and re-create it in art.

Oscar Wilde
Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

Oscar Wilde
All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

Oscar Wilde
At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.

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
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
Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.

Oscar Wilde
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