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Oscar Wilde -
Life
Quotes
146 Sourced Quotes
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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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I was disappointed with Niagara—most people must be disappointed with Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest disappointments in American married life.
Oscar Wilde
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The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
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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I should have remembered that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals.
Oscar Wilde
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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
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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
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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
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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
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As a wicked man I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back.
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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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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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
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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
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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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All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.
Oscar Wilde
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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
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Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. Mothers are different. Mothers are darlings.
Oscar Wilde
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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
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A woman's life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses.
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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An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.
Oscar Wilde
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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
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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
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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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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Oscar Wilde
Creative Commons
Born:
October 16, 1854
Died:
November 30, 1900
(aged 46)
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