High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.
The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.
Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?
The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.
My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
I can resist everything except temptation.
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
To be popular one must be mediocre.
A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.
Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.
I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.
He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
All art is quite useless.
There is no sin except stupidity.
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.
6 comments:
of course i enjoy nearly all of Wilde's witticisms, but my favorite in this bunch of quotes would have to be: "Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved."
Oscar Wilde is a pleasure to read, no doubt, which of course was his greatest aspiration--to be and to have pleasure.
However, the underlying absurdity of his ideal is apparent in the end of his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and also in the end of his own life.
Wilde was a beautiful fool. His snide criticism of the mundane was so strong that it perhaps cracked his own understanding of art for art's sake strongly enough for him to realize that such an espousal was/is/will be false.
Thanks for the comment on my blog...
I'm really going to have to bump The Picture of Dorian Gray to the top of my reading list. I can't believe I've never read it.
/taunya
Thanks for stopping by, Tim. As a rationalist I would agree with everything you said about Wilde. Yet the irrational part of me sees what Wilde did so effectively, which was to turn his life itself into art. In doing so he undoubtedly lost any chance to be conventionally happy, but he turned a mirror on the absurdities that exist all around us in life - art itself is absurd, of course, but then so is something as rational-seeming as science, when you get to the quantum level. By maintaining his often humorous but ultimately untenable philosophical outlook, he refused to compromise with that rational illusion so many others accept and wrestle with on a daily basis, and in doing so (in my imagination at least) he perhaps found some measure of freedom and absolution from it.
My favorite is the last one, of course.
Nah, I think I probably like that line for the same reason as you: It's funny.
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