Oscar Wilde Quotes - Page 12

Time is a waste of money.
Oscar Wilde
Punctuality is the thief of time
Oscar Wilde
That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good.
Oscar Wilde
LADY BRACKNELLTo speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.
Oscar Wilde
Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.
Oscar Wilde
The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde
You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.
Oscar Wilde
Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Oscar Wilde
The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.
Oscar Wilde
We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man - that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
Oscar Wilde
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
Oscar Wilde
You can never be overdressed or overeducated.
Oscar Wilde
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise
Oscar Wilde
The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.
Oscar Wilde
The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
nothing that is worth knowing can be taught
Oscar Wilde
For what is truth? In matters of relogion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one's last mood.
Oscar Wilde
For what is truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one's last mood.
Oscar Wilde
Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.
Oscar Wilde
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
Oscar Wilde
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
Oscar Wilde
Realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. 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
If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.
Oscar Wilde
The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
Oscar Wilde
Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.
Oscar Wilde
Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.
Oscar Wilde
When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.
Oscar Wilde
Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.
Oscar Wilde
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
Oscar Wilde
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Oscar Wilde
So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)
Oscar Wilde
With slouch and swing around the ringWe trod the Fools’ Parade!We did not care: we knew we wereThe Devils’ Own Brigade:And shaven head and feet of leadMake a merry masquerade.
Oscar Wilde
The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.
Oscar Wilde
I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
Oscar Wilde
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
Oscar Wilde
I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
Oscar Wilde
It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.
Oscar Wilde
My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.
Oscar Wilde
For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.
Oscar Wilde
Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.
Oscar Wilde
Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.
Oscar Wilde
With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.
Oscar Wilde
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
Oscar Wilde
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
Oscar Wilde
Die Welt ist von Narren geschaffen, damit Weise in ihr Leben.
Oscar Wilde
A flower blossoms for its own joy.
Oscar Wilde
Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.
Oscar Wilde
The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.
Oscar Wilde
The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.
Oscar Wilde
I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals.
Oscar Wilde
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
Oscar Wilde
She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.
Oscar Wilde
Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
Oscar Wilde
Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.
Oscar Wilde
I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.
Oscar Wilde
He is fairer than the morning star, and whiter than the moon. For his body I would give my soul, and for his love I would surrender heaven.
Oscar Wilde
The curves of your lips rewrite history.
Oscar Wilde
something was dead in each of us,and what was dead was hope.
Oscar Wilde
What a silly thing love is!' said the student as he walked away. 'It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to philosophy and study metaphysics.' So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read.
Oscar Wilde
LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.
Oscar Wilde