Oscar Wilde Real Quotations

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

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

One's only real life is the life one never leads.

There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

Then there was a man who said, 'I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; by then it was too late'

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.

An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship.

The world seemed to me fine because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived.

the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims....

There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off... p 207

Imagination is imitative-the real innovation lies in criticism.

The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.

The only real people are the people who never existed.

Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. ...Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. ...Art is Individualism...

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.

Sin is the only real colour element left in modern life.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.