Oscar Wilde - Life Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

View all Oscar Wilde Quotes
Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry.

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

Oscar Wilde
Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not quite old enough to do that.

Oscar Wilde
The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Tsǔ spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things.

Oscar Wilde
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless...

Oscar Wilde
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

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
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.

Oscar Wilde
Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.

Oscar Wilde
Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

Oscar Wilde
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
A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.

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
We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

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
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
Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life

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

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

Oscar Wilde
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
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
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

Oscar Wilde
Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.

Oscar Wilde
GILBERT: No ignoble consideration of probability, that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, effect it ever.

Oscar Wilde
What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.

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

Oscar Wilde