Oscar Wilde Quotes

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

You don't know what life is. You know nothing.

I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live.

But what is life if you don't live it?

Nothing matters except life and the love you make.

I don’t know what it means to live.

You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.

Existence is not itself a good thing, that we should spend a lifetime securing its necessaries: a life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily.

Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God.

I believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

I think the meaning of life is life itself. We don't necessarily want to know what it is, but we want to live it. Hopefully, we'll go out fast without knowing it.

Life is everything and nothing all at once.

The idea shared by many that life is a vale of tears is just as false as the idea shared by the great majority, the idea to which youth and health and riches incline you, that life is a place of entertainment.

What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.

It is worth while dying, to find out what life is.

I live my memoirs, I don’t have to write them down.

There are a lot of smart people being really thoughtful and writing really interesting things, but that isn't what I want to do. It's never felt like what I've been called to do. And I have to risk sounding really arrogant when I say that because I've gone to Ivy League schools and been privileged in all these ways in the world of ideas, but I'm not as smart as you think. I'm not really depending on what I learned in college to write my books. Those were just parts of my life experience.

The meaning of life is that nobody knows the meaning of life.

Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. Especially work. People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.

Take it from your own life, write what you believe in.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.

The meaning of life is to get meaning for life.

I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is.