Oscar Wilde - Time Quotes

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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
I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments.

Oscar Wilde
If people are dishonest once, they will be dishonest a second time. And honest people should keep away from them. (Lady Chiltern)

Oscar Wilde
Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Oscar Wilde
Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade. Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

Oscar Wilde
I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one's life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon's head, and one suffers, because it does not turn one to stone.

Oscar Wilde
You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.

Oscar Wilde
In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself.

Oscar Wilde
Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.

Oscar Wilde
There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

Oscar Wilde
I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.

Oscar Wilde
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely if ever do they forgive them.

Oscar Wilde
It was you I thought of all the time, I gave to them the love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs.

Oscar Wilde
Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid. Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.

Oscar Wilde
Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.

Oscar Wilde
For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.

Oscar Wilde
When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.

Oscar Wilde
Oh, why will parents always appear at the wrong time? Some extraordinary mistake in nature, I suppose.

Oscar Wilde
Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center of pain.

Oscar Wilde
If we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it.

Oscar Wilde
Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.

Oscar Wilde
He rides in the row at ten o clock in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night of the season. You don't call that leading an idle life, do you?

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

Oscar Wilde
Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.

Oscar Wilde
Just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in trying to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate himself.

Oscar Wilde
There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.

Oscar Wilde
Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. The past, the present and the future are but one moment in the sight of God, in whose sight we should try to live. Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought. The imagination can transcend them.

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
LADY STUTFIELD I adore silent men. MRS ALLONBY Oh, Ernest isn't silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don't know. I haven't listened to him for years.

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