Oscar Wilde Quotes About Passion

• Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

  Oscar Wilde

  Love, Friendship, Sarcastic

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays”, p.139, Simon and Schuster

• Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

  Oscar Wilde

  Being Yourself, Love Yourself, Taken

  Letter to Alfred Douglas, Jan. - Mar. 1897

• She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

  Oscar Wilde

  Laughter, Pain, Passion

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.49, GENERAL PRESS

• The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are very difficult to interpret (understand). Great passions are for the great of souls. Great events can only be seen by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.

  Oscar Wilde

  Passion, Sacrifice, Thinking

• Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Passion, Joy

• Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

  Oscar Wilde

  Lying, Passion, Men

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “A Critic in Pall Mall: Being Extracts from Reviews and Miscellanies”, p.135, Simon and Schuster

• A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.

  Oscar Wilde

  Passion, Secret, Age And Youth

  Oscar Wilde (2012). “The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde”, p.180, Courier Corporation

• It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

  Oscar Wilde

  Passion, Men, People

  Oscar Wilde (1977). “The illustrated Oscar Wilde”

• 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

  Memories, Passion, Yield

  Oscar Wilde (2005). “Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.29, Prestwick House Inc

• Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Passion, People

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Essential Oscar Wilde”, p.119, Simon and Schuster

• Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

  Oscar Wilde

  Passion, Differences, Long

  The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. 2 (1891)

• My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect---simply a confession of failures. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. But I don't want to interrupt you. Go on with your story.

  Oscar Wilde

  Loyalty, Passion, Boys

  Oscar Wilde (2005). “Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.48, Prestwick House Inc

• Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you.

  Oscar Wilde

  Love You, Passion, Men

• Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

  Oscar Wilde

  Life, Art, Passion

  Oscar Wilde, Moira Muldoon (2005). “The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings”, p.211, Simon and Schuster

• 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.

  Oscar Wilde

  Real, Passion, Self

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.109, Wordsworth Editions

• He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.

  Oscar Wilde

  Love, Passion, Mad

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.80, Xist Publishing

• 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.

  Oscar Wilde

  Real, Passion, Thinking

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Essential Oscar Wilde”, p.85, Simon and Schuster

• I am happy in my prison of passion

  Oscar Wilde

  Passion, Prison

• Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions." "I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Running, Art

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Story of a Fashionable Young Man Who Sells His Soul for Eternal Youth and Beauty (Beloved Books Edition)”, p.17, Lulu Press, Inc

• The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

  Oscar Wilde

  Passion, Differences, Littles

  The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. 2 (1891)

• A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Mother, Pain

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.36, GENERAL PRESS

• She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.

  Oscar Wilde

  Love, Passion, Age

  Oscar Wilde (2005). “Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.46, Prestwick House Inc

• I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you. But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.

  Oscar Wilde

  Country, Passion, Class

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “The picture of Dorian Gray/Le portrait de Dorian Gray”, p.60, Oscar Wilde

• There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm.

  Oscar Wilde

  Taken, Moving, Passion

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Story of a Fashionable Young Man Who Sells His Soul for Eternal Youth and Beauty (Beloved Books Edition)”, p.212, Lulu Press, Inc

• His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.

  Oscar Wilde

  Passion, Simple, New Experiences

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.51, GENERAL PRESS

You May Also Like:

Alfred Douglas

Edgar Allan Poe

Mark Twain

Charles Dickens

George Bernard Shaw

James Joyce

William Shakespeare