Inspirational Quotes by Oscar Wilde — Words of Wisdom for Daily Success

“Punctuality is the thief of time”

“What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise”

“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.”

“Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.”

“Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.”

“LADY BRACKNELL”

“Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”

“You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 (...)”

“In the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only Church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle. Many a worthy clergyman, who passes his life in admirable works of kindly charity, lives and dies unnoticed and unknown; but it is sufficient for some shallow uneducated passman out of either University to get up in his pulpit and express his doubts about Noah’s ark, or Balaam’s ass, or Jonah and the whale, for half of London to flock to hear him, and to sit open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect. The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low form of realism. It is silly, too. It springs from an entire ignorance of psychology. Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.”

“I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms.”

“There was something in the clear, pine-scented air of that winter morning that seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.”

“A flower blossoms for its own joy.”

“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.”

“It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.”

“For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.”

“Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.”

“Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.”

“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.”

“If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.”

“With slouch and swing around the ring”

“The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.”

“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.”

“To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor”

“Requiescat”

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”

“There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.”

“She lives in the poetry she cannot write.”

“She lives the poetry she cannot write.”

“The curves of your lips rewrite history.”

“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.”

“I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.”

“Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.”

“but love is not fashionable anymore, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once-but no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.”

“You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things...I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas”

“Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig.”

“The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.”

“Women have no appreciation of good looks—at least, good women have not.”

“She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.”

“Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.”

“Even things that are true can be proved.”

“One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.”

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

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

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

“Die Welt ist von Narren geschaffen, damit Weise in ihr Leben.”

“In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.”

“With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.”

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

“But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.”

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”

“Nowadays 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.”

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

“Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is.”

“Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.”

“Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also.”

“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.'”

“When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.”

“The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.”

“I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful”

“LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.”

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”

“The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.”

“Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.'”

“Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.”

“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”

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

“If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.”

“Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”

“It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.”

“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”

“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”

“I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”

“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”

“No good deed goes unpunished.”

“I have nothing to declare except my genius.”

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

“I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.”

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

“Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is.”

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

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

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

“I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!”

“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.”

“Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

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

“A kiss may ruin a human life”

“Hearts Live By Being Wounded”

“One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.”

“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.”