QuoteProject
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!
Oscar Wilde
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote reflects a sense of envy towards enduring beauty and the transient nature of life.

In this quote, Oscar Wilde expresses a deep jealousy towards things that possess eternal beauty, contrasting them with the inevitable decay and loss experienced in human life. He laments the fact that while he ages and loses aspects of himself, the painted portrait captures a moment of his beauty eternally, provoking feelings of mockery from a static representation of himself as he faces the fluid nature of existence and time.

Themes

JealousyBeautyMortalityTimeSelf-Reflection

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about the importance of capturing moments, this quote can illustrate the longing for permanence in an impermanent world.

More from Oscar Wilde

Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
Oscar WildeRead
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
Oscar WildeRead
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar WildeRead
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
Oscar WildeRead
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Oscar WildeRead

Similar quotes

There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.
Virginia WoolfRead
The greatest crimes have been found, in many instances, to be compatible with a superstitious piety and devotion; hence it is justly regarded as unsafe to draw any inference in favor of a man's morals, from the fervor or strictness of his religious exercises, even though he himself believe them sincere.
David HumeRead
Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo.
Hunter S. ThompsonRead
I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of it is crud.
Theodore SturgeonRead
Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might.
AeschylusRead
The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
Ben OkriRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.