Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)
Irish essayist, novelist, playwright and poet.
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
On George Bernard Shaw An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him.
We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.
The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference.
My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.
It is always the unreadable that occurs.
Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One must eat muffins quite calmly, it is the only way to eat them.
The only link between Literature and the Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play.
It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.
A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. [Answering the question, what is a cynic?]
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Ts? spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things.
All trials are trials of one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.
Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
Patriotism is the vice of nations.
In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.