Oscar Wilde's Wit and Wisdom

There are a lot of things Oscar Wilde said in this book. I figured you deserved to know something from his insightful book.  

 

A I feel like you can absorbed things through osmosis without recognition, but whatever. Let's start, shall we? 

"Life is much too important a thing to ever talk seriously about it"

"The Book of Life begins with a man and woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations"(Love this one)

"One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead".

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

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

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

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

From Catch-22: There's this great scene where the men are talking about their pasts, and their fathers and stuff... Like, one guy is talking about how he's rich and good things are just thrown at him for no apparent reason, which leads him to conclude that the riches must actually be someone else's, and another fellow pipes up and says, you know, perhaps it was my father's. He worked hard his whole life and only suffered from misfortune. And there are few other examples of oh, this is mine--but maybe it was meant to be for you, and vice versa. And then one guy says: "Just for once I'd like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in the universe."

 "I wrote that on a dollar and Alyssa got it and refused to spend it, to the best of my knowledge, to this day. She kept it affixed to the front of her daily planner for the remainder of the school year. It was kind of touching. ....I miss Alyssa..."

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

"I love acting. It is so much more real than life".

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

"The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast" .

"I wrote when I did not know life; now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no more to write. Life cannot be written; life can only be lived" .

"We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell'.

"In Paris one can lose one's time most delightfully; but one can never lose one's way" .

"But the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are"

"Women are meant to be loved, not understood". ( This is one of fav. quo).

"She'll never love you unless you are always at her heels; women like to be bothered".

"The one charm of the past is that it is past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen" .

"There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is".

"As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied".

"There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that the past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband".

"I sometimes think that God in creating man, somewhat overestimated His ability".

"What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance".

"Man, poor, awkward, reliable, necessary man belongs to a sex that has been rational for millions and millions of years. He can't help himself. It is in his race. The History of Woman is very different. We have always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of common sense. We saw its dangers from the first". 

"When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also" .

"Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable".

"People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that is is impossible to count them accurately" .

"One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing".

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

"I like men who have a future and women who have a past".

"Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications".

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing".

"I like persons better than principles and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world".

"It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true".

"People who want to say merely what is sensible should say it to themselves before they come down to breakfast in the morning, never after"

"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". 

"The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic".

"What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true".

"To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance".

"...Love and gluttony justify everything".

"Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the poor".

"Men always want to be a women's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. Women have a more subtle instinct about things: What they like is to be a man's last romance".

"Any place you love is the world to you" .

"...But love is not fashionable any more, 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".

"One should always be in love. That is 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 richness to life that nothing else can bring".

"Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer" .

"Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious; both are disappointed" .

"Once a week is quite enough to propose to anyone, and it should always be done in a manner that attracts some attention" .

"I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable".

"...In married life three is company and two is none" .

"The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding" .

"When a woman finds out about her husband she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for" .

"There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about".

"After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations".

"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one" 

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

"Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success" .

"Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die". 

"To lose one parent... may be regarded as misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness".

"I fare say that if I knew him I should not be his friend at all. It is a very dangerous thing to know one's friends".

"I shall never make a new friend in my life, though perhaps a few after I die".

"To get back to one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies".

"Youth is the one thing worth having".

"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up".

"...Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself" .

"He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone".

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

"One should always be a little improbable'.

"Everyone should keep someone else's diary" .

"Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest of motives".

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

"There is a fatality about good resolutions--they are always made too late" .

"One should always play fairly--when one has the winning cards" .

"I rely on you to misrepresent me" .

"A good reputation is one of the many annoyances to which I have never been subjected" .

"It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting".

"Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes".

"Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime".

"I can resist everything except temptation" .

"Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed" . 

"...There are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to" .

"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it" .

"The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future" .

"There is no sin except stupidity" .

"If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out" 

"It is the confession, not the priest that gives us absolution" 

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

"Geniuses... are always talking about themselves, when I want them to be thinking about me" . 

"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius" .

"I like looking at geniuses, and listening to beautiful people" .

"I know so many men in London whose only talent is washing. I suppose that is why men of genius so seldom wash; they are afraid of being mistaken for men of talent only!" 

"The worst thing you can do for a person of genius is to help him: that way lies his destruction. I have had many devoted helpers--and you see the result" .

"I think it is better to be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly".

"Good looks are a snare that every sensible man would like to be caught in".

"If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of" .

"The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it".

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative" .

"All art is quite useless"

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all"

"I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time and prevents arguments".

"Lots of people act well but very few people talk well, which shows that talking is much more the difficult thing of the two, and much the finer thing also"

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

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

"When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong" .

"Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything, and when they get older they know it".

"I don't want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that, and I never pay mine."

"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating".

"There is only one class in the community that thinks about money more than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else:.

"Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less".

"As for begging it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg".

.

"I am never in during the afternoon, except when I am confined to the house by a sharp attack of penury".

"Society often forgives the crminal; it never forgives the dreamer" .

"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious".

"Journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read" .

"As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar it will cease to be popular" .

"The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it".

"We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language" .

"Somehow I don't think I shall live to see the new century--if another century began and I was still alive, it would really be more than the English could stand".

"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances".

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

"He has nothing, but looks everything. What more can one desire?"

"I have made an important discovery... that alcohol, taken in sufficient qualities, produces all the effects of intoxication".

Regarding his brother's fondness for the drink: "Oh, he occasionally takes an alcoholiday".

"There are many things that we would throw away, if we were not afraid that others might pick them up".

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live".

"Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life".

"An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young".

"I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex".

"It is better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope".

"Work is the curse of the drinking class".

"It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done" .

"A mask tells us more than a face".

"Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt" . 

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again". 

"Cultivated leisure is the aim of man" .

"One could never pay too high a price for any sensation"

"If there was less sympathy in the world there would be less trouble in the world". 

"Moods don't last. It is their chief charm" .

"It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure".

"A woman's life revolves in curves of emotion" .

"...A sentimentalist is someone who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it". 

"Punctuality is the thief of time--I am not punctual myself, but I do like punctuality in others".

"I have the simplest tastes... I am always satisfied with the best" .