Quotes from Oscar Wilde

I see that any materialism in life coarsens the soul, and that the hunger of the body and the appetites of the flesh desecrate always, and often destroy.

Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

It's the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.

Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber

One should absorb the color of life.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

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

Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.

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 This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.

Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.

His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be

The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.

Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.

It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.

There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.

What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.

Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.

Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.

I gave my genius to my life, but my talent to my art.

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.

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