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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly deceived

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

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

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.

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

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

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

A kiss may ruin a human life

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

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

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

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

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Live the wonderful life that is in you.

Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry.

Life is a great disappointment.

Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good.

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

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

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.

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

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

Wisdom comes with winters

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.

Only the shallow know themselves.

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

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.

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.

I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

To be in love is to surpass one's self.

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

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.

Life is too short to learn German

We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

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.

Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won't expect it back.

Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.