Oscar Wilde Biography | Inspiration Quotations | Motivation Quotes

 Oscar Wilde Motivational Quotations:

• “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.”

• “If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.”

• “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”

•  “Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.”

• “Women are made to be loved, not understood.”

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

• “True friends stab you in the front.”

• “Everything popular is wrong.”

• “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

• “I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”

•  “To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”

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

• “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”

• “A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”

• “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

• “Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.”

• “Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.”

• “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.”

• “I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”

• “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

• “The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.”

• “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”

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

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

• “Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.”

• “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

• “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.”

• “Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.”

• “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.”

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

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

• “Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.”

• “Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.”

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

• “No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”

• “Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”

• “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

• “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.”

• “Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.”

• “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

• “Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat.”

• “This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.”

• “Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination.”

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

• “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.”

• “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”

• “Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.”

• “Hatred is blind, as well as love.”

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

• “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 theirown shame.”

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

• “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”

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

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

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

• “She is a peacock in everything but beauty.”

• “Who, being loved, is poor?”

• “How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.”

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

• “By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”

• “There is no sin except stupidity.”

• “An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.”

• “Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.”

• “Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.”

• “Work is the curse of the drinking classes.”

• “Only the shallow know themselves.”

• “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”

• “Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.”

• “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”

• “I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.”

  

• “It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.”

• “Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.”

• “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”

• “When good Americans die they go to Paris.”

• “Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.”

• “I am not young enough to know everything.”

• “A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.”

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

• “Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.”

• “I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.”

• “In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.”

• “He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.”

• “There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.”

• “Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.”

• “America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.”

• “The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”

• “Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.”

• “Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.”

• “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.”

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

• “A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.”

• “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”

• “Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.”

• “It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.”

• “Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.”

• “A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.”

• “The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.”

• “In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.”

• “You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.”

• “There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.”

• “In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.”

• “I have a dining room done in different shades of white, with white cushions embroidered in yellow silk: the effect is absolutely delightful and the room beautiful.”

• “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.”

• “The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.”

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

• “How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.”

• “Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.”

• “Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.”

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

• “If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.”