62 Oscar Wilde Quotes on Philosophy

Oscar Wilde quotes on philosophy

1. 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.

3. Lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance - And must I lose a soul's inheritance?** Helas!, l. 12-14 (1881)

9. The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Tsu spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things.

16. Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.

17. Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.

18. All art is immoral.

20. le mystere de l'amour est plus grand que le mystere de la mort.

21. The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.

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

27. Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

30. No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

35. Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

39. 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.

41. There is no sin except stupidity.

49. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

52. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

55. Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.

58. Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.

64. Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.

70. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

71. Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.

88. To be in love is to surpass one's self.

89. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

90. Conscience makes egotists of us all.

92. You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.

99. Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.

101. To define is to limit.

108. Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

109. Often quoted as: Life is far too important to be taken seriously.

114. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

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

116. What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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

120. Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

121. The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.

125. Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

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

131. Only the shallow know themselves.

139. Lord Illingworth: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. Mrs. Allonby: It ends with Revelations.

146. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

152. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!

158. 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.

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

174. Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.

175. Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.

176. Usually quoted as: No man is rich enough to buy back his own past.

180. I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.

184. The only possible society is oneself.

195. A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

203. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

205. I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

208. It is sweet to dance to violins When Love and Life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!

209. Something was dead in each of us, And what was dead was Hope.

210. And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, None knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.

214. And all, but Lust, is turned to dust In Humanity's machine.

217. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.

219. The supreme vice is shallowness.

222. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

232. I am dying as I have lived: beyond my means.

245. From the beginning Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands.

249. The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.

252. I'm not young enough to know everything.