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Oscar Wilde Quotes about Pain

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But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving

But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.

Pain, True Friend, Mean

Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.346, Wordsworth Editions

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. ... For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.

Sad, Stars, Pain

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Art, Pain, Book

Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.7, Oxford University Press on Demand

She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

Laughter, Pain, Passion

Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.49, GENERAL PRESS

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.

Life, Sympathy, Pain

Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.51, First Avenue Editions

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

Beautiful, Pain, Men

Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.1079, Wordsworth Editions

It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that 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.

Pain, Struggle, Silly

Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.20, GENERAL PRESS

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.

Education, Pain, Genius

Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.15, Oxford University Press on Demand

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music - his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting - that which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and all modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.

Art, Pain, Appreciate

Oscar Wilde (2015). “The critic as artist (low cost). Limited edition”, p.77, Oscar Wilde

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.

Sad, Pain, Eye

Oscar Wilde (1909). “De profundus”

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

Pain, Portraits, Oblivion

Oscar Wilde (2004). “The Best of Oscar Wilde: Selected Plays and Writings”, p.316, Penguin

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center of pain.

Pain, Grief, Circles

Oscar Wilde (1961). “Works: Edited with an Introduction”

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?

Sad, Pain, Gold

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

Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.

Sympathy, Pain, Joy

Oscar Wilde (2016). “Aphorisms”, p.65, Oscar Wilde

A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Beautiful, Mother, Pain

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

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

Pain, Prison Time, Jail

Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.51, Oxford University Press on Demand

My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.

Pain, Writing, Character

Oscar Wilde (2014). “The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde”, p.183, Courier Corporation

There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.

Sympathy, Pain, Morbid

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.

Dream, Pain, Glasses

Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray (with an Essay by Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly)”, p.37, Mondial

Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask.

Laughter, Pain, Joy

Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.105, Oxford University Press on Demand

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