Quotes from Oscar Wilde

The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.

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.

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

...The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in my life.

The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.

Life would be dull without them.

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

To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.

The proper school to learn art is not life but art

To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.

Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off... p 207

Life is like a box of terrible analogies.

Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar

We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.

Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not quite old enough to do that.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.