Oscar Wilde Quotes

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!

Beauty is but a flower, which wrinkles will devour.

I envied these women I saw before me, their beauty still intact. Life has its revenge of life. Untimely death is the secret of eternal youth.

To see the years touch ye gives me joy", he whispered, "for it means that ye live.

Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.

I do think about aging. I have those moments of panic and vanity, but life keeps getting better, so you can't worry about it too much.

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away.

In a dream you are never eighty.

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

A face to lose youth for, to occupy age With the dream of, meet death with.

Nothing ages as poorly as a beautiful woman's ego.

You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn't much time left.

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying: And this same flower that smiles to day, Tomorrow will be dying.

But, Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, It tickleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. But age, alias! that al wole envenyme, Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith. Lat go, farewel! the devel go therwith! The flour is goon, ther is namoore to telle; The bren, as I best kan, now most I selle.

Only youth has a taste of immortality.

See all the women seated, youth in their face lifts, old age in their hands.

When a woman's face is wrinkled And her hairs are sprinkled, With gray, Lackaday! Aside she's cast, No one respect will pay; Remember, Lasses, remember. And while the sun shines make hay: You must not expect in December, The flowers you gathered in May.

The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.

A frail gift is beauty, which grows less as time draws on, and is devoured by its own years.

Try to hold on to youth and it mocks you while it sprints away.

The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.