Oscar Wilde Quotes

“Truth in Art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit.”
― Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works

“But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of.”
― Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works

“Vera, my lad, has got too many ideas; I don’t think much of ideas myself; I’ve got on well enough in life without ’em;”
― Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works

“the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.”
― Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works

“But what business was it of mine? I didn’t make the world. Let God and the Czar look to it.”
― Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works

“Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly,—that is what each of us is here for.”
― Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works

“Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed Love. But anything will feed Hate. There was not a glass of champagne you drank, not a rich dish you ate of in all those years, that did not feed your Hate and make it fat. So to gratify it, you gambled with my life, as you gambled with my money, carelessly, recklessly, indifferent to the consequence.”
― Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works

“reductio ad absurdum”
― Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works

“Prince Paul. And an excellent supper. Gringoire really excelled himself in his salad. Ah! you may laugh, Baron; but to make a good salad is a much more difficult thing than cooking accounts. To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist—the problem is so entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one’s vinegar.”
― Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works