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Life Quotes by Oscar Wilde

421 Life quotes by Oscar Wilde

All Life quotes Oscar Wilde’s page

Many people become bankrupt by investing too heavily in the prose of life, writes Oscar Wilde. He jokes that love is two fool things after another, while truth can leave a man feeling exhausted. Wilde also believes that art is the shield that protects us from life's harsh realities.

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“And each man kills the thing he loves.”

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Life is a great disappointment.

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I didn't have a life until I went up onstage.

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I don't want to earn a living. I want to live.

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“Life is short, art is infinite.”

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Live the wonderful life that is in you.

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“Life has always poppies in her hands.”

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Where your life leads you, you must go

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A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.

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

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Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

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I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.

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Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.

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“To become the spectator of one’s own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.”

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

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

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Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which…

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“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into…

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We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as…

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“The real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence,…

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“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to…

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“it is always the women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women. Except, of course, in middle-class…

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Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing…

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One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

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“You, who know all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm Sibyl Vane to love me! I want to make…

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If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that…

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If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself - a rare type in our time…

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But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never…

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“They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more than one life. They become…

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“You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but…

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“In every sphere of life, form is the beginning of things. […] Forms are the food of faith, cried Newman in one…

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“You know how I love secrecy. It is the only thing that can make modern life wonderful or mysterious to us. The…

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Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity…

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“I fancy that the true explanation is this: It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic…

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There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us…

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“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid…

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“And so, it is not our own life that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells…

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There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life,…

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“When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have…

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“Youth! There is nothing like it. It’s absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. The only people whose opinions I listen…

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More by Oscar Wilde

How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others

Who, being loved, is poor?

“Basil my dear boy puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life…

Anybody can be good in the country

I don't at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.

“Alles Populäre ist falsch.”

“If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are…

To love one's self is the beginning of a life-long romance

“Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.”

Men always want to be a womans first love. Women have a more subtle instinct: What they like is to be a mans last…

Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a…