Oscar Wilde Quotes - Page 7

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.
Oscar Wilde
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Oscar Wilde
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
Oscar Wilde
Men always want to be a woman`s first love - women like to be a man`s last romance.
Oscar Wilde
To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.
Oscar Wilde
Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.
Oscar Wilde
As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
Oscar Wilde
And to the little Squirrel who lived in the fir-tree, and was lonely, he said, 'Where is my mother?' And the Squirrel answered, 'Thou hast slain mine. Dost thou seek to slay thine also?
Oscar Wilde
It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.
Oscar Wilde
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
Experience is a question of instinct about life.
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
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar Wilde
Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves?
Oscar Wilde
And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.
Oscar Wilde
Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.
Oscar Wilde
A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.
Oscar Wilde
It is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.
Oscar Wilde
In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.
Oscar Wilde
The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.
Oscar Wilde
Mary Farquhar, who always flirts with her own husband across the dinner-table. That is not very pleasant. Indeed, it is not even decent . . . and that sort of thing is enormously on the increase. The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public...
Oscar Wilde
You don't seem to realise, that in married life three is company and two is none.
Oscar Wilde
ALGERNON. I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.JACK. I have no doubt about that, dear Algy. The Divorce Court was specially invented for people whose memories are so curiously constituted.ALGERNON. Oh! there is no use speculating on that subject. Divorces are made in Heaven-...
Oscar Wilde
They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.
Oscar Wilde
Bad artists always admire each others work.
Oscar Wilde
Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.
Oscar Wilde
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
Oscar Wilde
But neither milk-white rose nor red May bloom in prison air;The shard, the pebble, and the flint, Are what they give us there:For flowers have been known to heal A common man's despair.
Oscar Wilde
You are not listening to a word I am saying . . . and I am making the most delightful plans for your future.
Oscar Wilde
Lord Henry smiled. "He gives you good advice, I suppose. People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.
Oscar Wilde
People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.
Oscar Wilde
Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life.
Oscar Wilde
There is no Mystery so great as Misery.
Oscar Wilde
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.
Oscar Wilde
The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.
Oscar Wilde
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.
Oscar Wilde
But somehow, I feel sure that if I lived in the country for six months, I should become so unsophisticated that no one would take the slightest notice of me.
Oscar Wilde
Failure is only the name that we give to our mistakes."-Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.
Oscar Wilde
And yet it was not the mystery, but the comedy of suffering that struck him; its absolute uselessness, its grotesque want of meaning. How incoherent everything seemed! How lacking in all harmony! He was amazed at the discord between the shallow optimism of the day, and the real facts of existence. He was still very young.
Oscar Wilde
The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world... They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet... Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
Oscar Wilde
But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ― curious as it may sound to you ― is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.
Oscar Wilde
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
Oscar Wilde
The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art.
Oscar Wilde
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
Oscar Wilde
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
Oscar Wilde
Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?
Oscar Wilde
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth
Oscar Wilde
To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.
Oscar Wilde
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.
Oscar Wilde
My dear fellow, it isn't easy to be anything nowadays. There's such a lot of beastly competition about.
Oscar Wilde
If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.
Oscar Wilde
Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices.
Oscar Wilde
The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.
Oscar Wilde
Bronze-limbed and well-knit, like a statue wrought by a Grecian, he stood on the sand with his back to the moon, and out of the foam came white arms that beckoned to him, and out of the waves rose dim forms that did him homage. Before him lay his shadow, which was the body of his Soul, and behind him hung the moon in the honey-coloured air.
Oscar Wilde
Silently we went round and round,And through each hollow mindThe memory of dreadful thingsRushed like a dreadful wind,And horror stalked before each man,And terror crept behind.
Oscar Wilde
I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them.
Oscar Wilde