Oscar Wilde Quotes About Gold

• The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

  Oscar Wilde

  Fate, Curves, Ivory

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.152, Wordsworth Editions

• In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.

  Oscar Wilde

  Love, Strong, Children

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.250, Wordsworth Editions

• Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

  Oscar Wilde

  Giving, Ignorant, Listening

  Oscar Wilde (2005). “Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.28, Prestwick House Inc

• Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.

  Oscar Wilde

  Sad, Pain, Eye

  Oscar Wilde (1909). “De profundus”

• Surely Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds, and dearer than fine opals. Pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the marketplace. It may not be purchased of the merchants, for can it be weighed out in the balance for gold.

  Oscar Wilde

  Love Is, Balance, Gold

  Oscar wilde (1943). “The Happy Prince and Other Tales (Illustrated)”, p.14, LCI

• Is it thy will that I should wax and wane,
  Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey,
  And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain
  Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day?

  Oscar Wilde

  Sad, Pain, Gold

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.847, Wordsworth Editions

• I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.

  Oscar Wilde

  Garden, Thinking, Air

  Oscar Wilde (1961). “DE PROFUNDIS”, p.33, VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS

• Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! Some kill their love when they are young, And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of Lust, Some with the hands of Gold: The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold. Some love too little, some too long, Some sell, and others buy; Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die.

  Oscar Wilde

  Kissing, Men, Hands

  The Ballad of Reading Gaol pt. 1, st. 7 (1898) See Roberts 1

• Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the dullness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange snakespotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud's building in the College of St. John.

  Oscar Wilde

  Lying, College, Oxford

  Oscar Wilde (1999). “De Profundis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings”, p.231, Wordsworth Editions

• Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief.

  Oscar Wilde

  Husband, Women, Grief

  The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. 15 (1891). A similar quotation appears inWilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest, act 1 (1895).

• Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar

  Oscar Wilde

  Giving, Ignorant, Listening

  Oscar Wilde (2005). “Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.28, Prestwick House Inc

• Death is a great price to pay for a red rose“, cried the Nightingale, "and Life is very dear to all. “ It is pleasant to sit in the green wood, and watch the Sun in his chariot of gold, and the Moon in her chariot of pearl. Sweet is the scent oft he hawthorn, and sweet are the bluebells that hide in the valley, and the heather that blows on the hill. Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?

  Oscar Wilde

  Sweet, Heart, Blow

  Oscar Wilde (2008). “Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde”, p.24, Penguin

• How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.

  Oscar Wilde

  Soul, Gold, Pieces

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.230, GENERAL PRESS

• For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.

  Oscar Wilde

  Sad, Taken, Twilight

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.82, Oxford University Press on Demand

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