Oscar Wilde Quotes

I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.

When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.

You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.

A reflection of an exact image is the closest thing to you-so that you can see it-but it's far enough away so that you really understand it. There is real life in this movie, but it hovers just an inch above reality.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

I don't think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.

Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.

Age, like distance lends a double charm.

I'm beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

Time is the wisest counselor of all.

I actually think there's an incredible amount of self-knowledge that comes with getting older.

I was always an outsider, always standing outside, observing and trying to figure things out. Which is exactly what you need to do as a writer, I suppose.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

You don't really know much until you get to be 70.

Those old enough to write their memoirs should not comment on contemporary issues.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

I've become a lot wiser over the years.

The years teach much which the days never know.

Even though you can have a youthful energy, it doesn't mean that you can't know a lot and bring a lot to the situation.

There's something about being around a long time that puts stuff in perspective.

I've known and seen a lot of things over my years.

Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.