Quote

The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.

Oscar Wilde

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Oscar Wilde
Age: 46 †
Born: 1854
Born: October 16
Died: 1900
Died: November 30
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Oscar O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Sure
Nothing
Trying
Way
Make
Useful
Life
Oneself
Existence
Knowing

More quotes by Oscar Wilde

Image
Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things.
Oscar Wilde
Image
I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.
Oscar Wilde
Image
They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
Oscar Wilde
Image
...The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel
Oscar Wilde
Image
Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Alone, and without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
Oscar Wilde
Image
When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.
Oscar Wilde
Image
In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
Oscar Wilde
Image
But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.
Oscar Wilde
Image
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Oscar Wilde
Image
The only thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Oh, don't cough, Ernest. When one is dictating one should speak fluently and not cough. Besides, I don't know how to spell a cough.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Travel ennobles the spirit and does away with our prejudices.
Oscar Wilde
Image
History is merely gossip
Oscar Wilde
Image
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.
Oscar Wilde
Image
The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
Oscar Wilde
Image
If God wished to punish us, all he would need to do would be to answer our prayers.
Oscar Wilde
Image
There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.
Oscar Wilde
Image
A man who takes himself too seriously will find that no one else takes him seriously.
Oscar Wilde