Oscar Wilde - Man Quotes

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A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Oscar Wilde
I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Oscar Wilde
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.

Oscar Wilde
With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

Oscar Wilde
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.

Oscar Wilde
The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world's sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer.

Oscar Wilde
No man should have a secret from his wife. She invariably finds it out.

Oscar Wilde
If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.

Oscar Wilde
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Oscar Wilde
The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence.

Oscar Wilde
To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.

Oscar Wilde
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

Oscar Wilde
The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.

Oscar Wilde
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

Oscar Wilde
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
A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.

Oscar Wilde
There was purification in punishment. Not 'Forgive us our sins,' but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of a man to a most just God.

Oscar Wilde
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

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
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it

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
I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.

Oscar Wilde
LADY BRACKNELL Algernon is an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, eligible young man. He has nothing, but he looks everything. What more can one desire?

Oscar Wilde
If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself - a rare type in our time... you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days. But Oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next to a man who has spent his life in trying to educate others! What a dreadful experience that is!

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
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
One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

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
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

Oscar Wilde
On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.

Oscar Wilde