Oscar Wilde

"Como Chesterton, como Lang, como Boswell, Wilde es de aquellos venturosos que pueden prescindir de la aprobación de la crítica y aun, a veces, de la aprobación del lector, pues el agrado que nos proporciona su trato es irresistible y constante."

"We see these insane practices reflected in the buy-outs and takeovers on Wall Street. It's the same thing: exchanging long-term security for short-term gain. You sacrifice a company for the immediate rewards. But you destroy what produces jobs and livelihoods and economic health. If you eat the seed corn, you won't have a crop to plant. Oscar Wilde once said, "A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." We look at the price, but we don't look at the value. Economics and profit drive everything. People forget that the soil is our sustenance. It is a sacred trust. It is what has worked for us for centuries, It is what we pass on to future generations."

"Tread Lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow."

"Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde."

"He was a great artist. He also was really a charlatan. I mean by a charlatan one sufficiently dignified to despise the tricks that he employs. ... Wilde and his school professed to stand as solitary artistic souls apart from the public. They professed to scorn the middle class, and declared that the artist must not work for the bourgeois. The truth is that no artist so really great ever worked so much for the bourgeois as Oscar Wilde. No man, so capable of thinking about truth and beauty, ever thought so constantly about his own effect on the middle classes. ... One might go through his swift and sparkling plays with a red and blue pencil marking two kinds of epigrams; the real epigram which he wrote to please his own wild intellect, and the sham epigram which he wrote to thrill the very tamest part of our tame civilization."

"Wilde himself wrote some things that were not immorality, but merely bad taste; not the bad taste of the conservative suburbs, which merely means anything violent or shocking, but real bad taste; as in a stern subject treated in a florid style; an over-dressed woman at a supper of old friends; or a bad joke that nobody had time to laugh at. This mixture of sensibility and coarseness in the man was very curious; and I for one cannot endure (for example) his sensual way of speaking of dead substances, satin or marble or velvet, as if he were stroking a lot of dogs and cats."

"Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod."

"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."

"Oscar Wilde did not dive very deeply below the surface of human nature, but found, to a certain extent rightly, that there is more on the surface of life than is seen by the eyes of most people."

"He had first to free English speech from its weight of serious meaning. He had to win for prose, for measured sentence and paragraph, the license that his contemporaries would concede only to verse: the freedom to delight instantly, in virtue of form alone, and the right to forestall reflection by an explosion of felicity in phrasing. He used the epigram, as a literary form, very much as a ballet-master uses exercises at the bar."

"No, I've never cared for his work. Too scented."

"Not the least of the twentieth-century phenomena that Wilde so uncannily anticipated was the cult of celebrity; and indeed, soon after deciding against a career as a classicist, he was making his first serious effort at courting international fame. During his 1882 tour of America, he was already showing a shrewd understanding of the uses to which that most Greek of literary forms, the epigram, might be put in the age of the telegram and the newspaper."

"romantic, socialist author."

"The reason Wilde did his best work after turning homosexual is that women simply reinforced his own feminine sentimentality. ... Heterosexuality inhibited his imagination because woman is physically and psychologically internal."

"When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde."

"If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it."

"Men lived more vividly in his presence, and talked better than themselves."

"He was never quite sure himself where and when he was serious."

"He (Jack London) wrote an essay called "What Life Means to Me" which takes its place with Kropotkin's "Appeal to the Young" and Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," and its closing sentence rings with his faith in the rise of the common man. "The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending.""

"What has Oscar in common with Art? except that he dines at our tables and picks from our platter the plums for the puddings he peddles in the provinces. Oscar -- the amiable, irresponsible, esurient Oscar -- with no more sense of a picture than of the fit of a coat, has the courage of the opinions -- of others!"

"I wish I'd said that"

":(by Wilde, to a witty remark by ), to which Whistler riposted:"

"The dinner table was Wilde's event and made him the greatest talker of his time..."

"The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw."

"Lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance — And must I lose a soul's inheritance?"

"If it took Labouchere three columns to prove that I was forgotten, then there is no difference between fame and obscurity."

"And down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet, Crept like a frightened girl."

"Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood."

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."

"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 Tsǔ spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things."

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

"Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event."

"From its earliest years every American child spends most of its time in correcting the faults of its father and mother; and no one who has had the opportunity of watching an American family on the deck of an Atlantic steamer, or in the refined seclusion of a New York boarding-house, can fail to have been struck by this characteristic of their civilisation. In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience. A boy of only eleven or twelve years of age will firmly but kindly point out to his father his defects of manner or temper; will never weary of warning him against extravagance, idleness, late hours, unpunctuality, and the other temptations to which the aged are so particularly exposed; and sometimes, should he fancy that he is monopolising too much of the conversation at dinner, will remind him, across the table, of the new child's adage, 'Parents should be seen, not heard.'"

"A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle."

"And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

"We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language."

"It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal."

"All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction."

"The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition."

"Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror."

"All art is immoral."

"He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him."

"le mystère de l'amour est plus grand que le mystère de la mort."

"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."

"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."

"On George Bernard Shaw An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him."

"I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram."

"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..."

"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."