Oscar Wilde Quotes about Exercise

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Oscar Wilde

Birthday, Exercise, Up Early

The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. 19 (1891)

Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.

Oscar Wilde

Leadership, Exercise, Power

Oscar Wilde, Isobel Murray (1999). “The Soul of Man, and Prison Writings”, p.8, Oxford University Press, USA

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.

Oscar Wilde

Exercise, Authority, Degrading

"The Soul of Man Under Socialism" (1891)

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.

Oscar Wilde

Exercise, Class, Needs

Quoted in Hesketh Pearson, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Wit (1946)

All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.

Oscar Wilde

Mean, Exercise, Government

"The Soul of Man Under Socialism" (1891)

I often take exercise. Why only yesterday I had breakfast in bed.

Oscar Wilde

Exercise, Yesterday, Bed

To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.

Oscar Wilde

Fear, Exercise, Power

The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk.

Oscar Wilde

Exercise, Form, Walks

Quoted in Alvin Redman The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde (1952).

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

Oscar Wilde

Disappointment, Crazy, Exercise

Oscar Wilde, Merlin Holland (2003). “Collins complete works of Oscar Wilde”, HarperCollins UK

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that - perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.

Oscar Wilde

Real, Passion, Exercise

Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.36, GENERAL PRESS

Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.

Oscar Wilde

Exercise, Men, Class

Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.1044, Wordsworth Editions

Oscar Wilde Quotes about Exercise

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