Oscar Wilde on Life

"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 a richness to life that nothing else can bring."

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

"I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood."

"The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for."

"I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy."

"There are few things easier than to live badly and to die well."

"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."

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

"Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing."

"Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions."

"As for modern Journalism, its not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest."

"All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death;"

"I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living."

"The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life."

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

"Why, what a wonderful piece of luck! Here is a red rose! I have never seen any rose like it in all my life. It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name."

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

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."

"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."

"I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram."

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

"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence."

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

"Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."

"To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul."

"Oscar Wilde online The Works and Life of Oscar Wilde"

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

"Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life."

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

"God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too."