Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)
Irish essayist, novelist, playwright and poet.
Wilde's voice was of the brown velvet order — mellifluous — rounded — in a sense giving it a plummy quality — rather on the adenotic side — but practically pure cello — and very pleasing.
No, I've never cared for his work. Too scented.
One of the requisites of sanity is to disagree with the majority of the British public.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb a the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.
Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.
Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.
It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.
People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.
Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do.
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.
Oh, I love London society! It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what society should be.
It will be a marvellous thing--the true personality of man--when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning.