Oscar Wilde Quotes on Mind (15 Quotes)

Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame…

To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man - that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

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

To influence a person is to give him ones own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one elses music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

Men of thought should have nothing to do with action.

There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.... The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art I altered the minds of men and the colour of things there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder.... I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.