Oscar Wilde Life Quotations

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 a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

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

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

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

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.

Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.

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

One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

'The Lady's World' should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

Life is too important to be taken seriously.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. / MRS. ALLONBY: It ends with Revelations.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.

It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.

The only way a woman can ever reform her husband is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life

Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. The Picture of Dorian Gray

The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly deceived

Woman's first duty in life is to her dressmaker. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.

To be entirely free, and at the same time, entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realise at every moment.

The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.

If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself you rise from the table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days.

As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.

All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

The first duty of life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one as yet discovered.

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

The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.

It is sweet to dance to violins When love and life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!

All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.

Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope.

the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.

No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself

You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing.

He made me see what Life is, and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than both.

Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it.

I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.

Ah! somehow life is bigger after all Than any painted angel could we see The God that is within us!

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. 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.

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.

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

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

The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.

One's only real life is the life one never leads.

One can live for years sometimes without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into one single hour.

I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.

All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.

The secret of life is in art.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

I can resist everything except temptation.

Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.

They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.

A kiss may ruin a human life

The secret to life is to enjoy the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.

The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.

I don't want to earn my living, I want to live.

Be happy, be happy; you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's-blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

The only one you need in your life is that person who shows you he needs you in his.

Life is too short to be taken seriously.

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.

Only the shallow know themselves.

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.

Wisdom comes with winters

It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of the world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.

The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.

The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life.

Sin is the only real colour element left in modern life.

I wrote when I did not know life; now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no more to write. Life cannot be written; life can only be lived.

Lord Darlington (LD): I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules. Lady Windemere (LW): If we had 'hard-and-fast rules' we would find life much simpler. LD: You allow of no exceptions? LW: None! LD: Ah, what a fascinating Puritan you are, LW. LW: The adjective was unnecessary, LD.

Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.

Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.