Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wildewas an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 October 1854
CityDublin, Ireland
CountryIreland
The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.
I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciosness, to wake their ashes in pain.
Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything, and when they grow older, they know it
As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes, they forgive them
How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it was only the other way! If it was I who were to be always young, and the picture that were to grow old! For this--for this--I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give!
The final mystery is oneself.
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.
Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
The trouble with women is, that when they grow up, they turn into their mothers. The trouble with men is, that they don't.
The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.
The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.