Quote

Imagination is imitative-the real innovation lies in criticism.

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
Criticism
Lies
Imagination
Lying
Real
Imitative
Innovation

More quotes by Oscar Wilde

Image
I could never quite accustom myself to absinthe, but it suits my style so well
Oscar Wilde
Image
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.
Oscar Wilde
Image
The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite with books my life would be livable -- any life.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.
Oscar Wilde
Image
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.
Oscar Wilde
Image
I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
Oscar Wilde
Image
What a fuss people make about fidelity! exclaimed Lord Henry. Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Oh, I love London Society! It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be.
Oscar Wilde
Image
I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.
Oscar Wilde
Image
It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.
Oscar Wilde
Image
To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Finding the meaning of life is easy. Simply get a dictionary, go to the 'L' section, and find the word 'life.'
Oscar Wilde
Image
The ugly can be beautiful. The pretty, never.
Oscar Wilde
Image
And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.
Oscar Wilde
Image
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Oscar Wilde
Image
When I had to fill in my immigration papers, I gave my age as 19, and my profession as genius I added that I had nothing to declare except my talent.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising and lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweler.
Oscar Wilde
Image
To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life.
Oscar Wilde
Image
Then there was a man who said, 'I never knew what real happiness was until I got married by then it was too late'
Oscar Wilde
Image
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.
Oscar Wilde