Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man. Wilde Oscar

to see the dramatic value of doublets and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.

      Plain women are always jealous of their husbands; beautiful women never are! They never have time. They are always so occupied in being jealous of other people's husbands.

      What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime and the duties exacted from one after one's death land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position and prevents one from keeping it up.

      A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a nonconformist conscience. And most women know it, I am glad to say.

      It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat.

      A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

      What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip, but scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

      All beautiful things belong to the same age.

      It is personalities, not principles, that move the age.

      Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious and their method too clearly defined. One exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and then they become as tedious as one's relations.

      To know nothing about our great men is one of the necessary elements of English education.

      The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either and modern literature a complete impossibility.

      You may laugh, but it is a great thing to come across a woman who thoroughly understands one.

      The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism.

      The number of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.

      The chief thing that makes life a failure from the artistic point of view is the thing that lends to life its sordid security – the fact that one can never repeat exactly the same emotion.

      We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

      Vulgar habit that is people have nowadays of asking one, after one has given them an idea, whether one is serious or not. Nothing is serious except passion. The intellect is not a serious thing and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all. The only serious form of intellect I know is the British intellect, and on the British intellect the illiterate always plays the drum.

      It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

      It is only the modern that ever become old-fashioned.

      It is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production.

      Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

      Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.

      The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art.

      To the philosopher women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

      The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

      The only horrible thing in the world is 'ennui.' That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.

      French songs I cannot possibly allow. People always seem to think that they are improper, and either look shocked, which is vulgar, or laugh, which is worse.

      It has often been made a subject of reproach against artists and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature. As a rule this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision and inversity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of so much importance.

      The work of art is to dominate the spectator. The spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

      One should sympathise with the joy, the beauty, the colour of life. The less said about life's sores the better.

      You can't make people good by act of Parliament – that is something.

      Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and having done so passes on to other things. Nature, on the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating the effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

      It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

      A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent.

      One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.

      Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men. I wonder we women stand it as well as we do.

      The truth is a thing I get rid of as soon as possible. Bad habit, by the way, makes one very unpopular at the club … with the older members. They call it being conceited. Perhaps it is.

      My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.

      Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue – that is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad and to leave us quite unattractively good.

      Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world's tongue.

      Wicked women bother one. Good women bore one. That is the only difference between them.

      To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts.

      I don't believe in the existence of Puritan women. I don't think there is a woman in the world who would not be a little flattered if one made love to her. It is that which makes women so irresistibly adorable.

      When I am in trouble eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink.

      When one is going to lead an entirely new life one requires regular and wholesome meals.

      The soul is born old, but grows young. That is the comedy of life. The body is born young, and grows old. That is life's tragedy.

      One can survive everything nowadays except death, and live down anything except a good reputation.

      The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what men should not have been. The present is what men ought not to be. The future is what artists are.

      Men become old, but they never become good.

      By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful; this very celibacy leads weaker vessels astray.

      I think that in practical life there is something about success, actual success, that is a little unscrupulous, something about ambition that is scrupulous always.

      Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth.