The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde Read online

  —Letter [November 25, 1897]

  … pity seems to beat in vain at the doors of officialism; and power, no less than punishment, kills what else were good and gentle in a man: the man without knowing it loses his natural kindliness, or grows afraid of its exercise.

  —Letter from prison [July 2, 1896]

  Authority is as destructive to those who exercise it as it is to those on whom it is exercised.

  —Letter [May 27, 1897]

  I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. I am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment. This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

  —De Profundis

  Chapter 15

  TALK

  Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.

  —Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 2

  “I could deny myself the pleasure of talking, but not to others the pleasure of listening.”

  —Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]

  “I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”

  —Rocket, “The Remarkable Rocket”

  A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule.

  —Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance, Act 3

  Oh! don’t use big words. They mean so little.

  —Mrs. Cheveley, An Ideal Husband, Act 3

  Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.

  —Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 1

  HESTER: I dislike London dinner-parties.

  MRS. ALLONBY: I adore them. The clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk.

  —A Woman of No Importance, Act 1

  “… murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.”

  —Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 19

  Geniuses talk so much, don’t they? Such a bad habit! And they are always thinking about themselves, when I want them to be thinking about me.

  —Mabel Chiltern, An Ideal Husband, Act 2

  When men give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.

  —Mrs. Erlynne, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act 2

  Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else.

  —Gwendolen, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1

  I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.

  —Lady Bracknell, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 3

  … it is a very dangerous thing to listen. If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person.

  —Lord Goring, An Ideal Husband, Act 1

  “It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”

  —Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 1

  I think that life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

  —Lord Darlington, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act I

  I love talking about nothing … It is the only thing I know anything about.

  —Lord Goring, An Ideal Husband, Act 1

  I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.

  —Jack, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1

  How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say.

  —Lady Hunstanton, A Woman of No Importance, Act 2

  “We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.”

  —Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]

  Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

  —The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 3

  LORD CAVERSHAM: Do you always really understand what you say, sir?

  LORD GORING (after some hesitation): Yes, father, if I listen attentively.

  —An Ideal Husband, Act 3

  “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”

  —Wilde, as quoted in conversation (many years after the fact), in response to a U.S.

  Customs official’s query: “Have you anything to declare?” [OW]

  You stab me with a thousand phrases: if one phrase of mine shrills through the air near you, you cry out that you are wounded to death.

  —Letter [December 6, 1897]

  “I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.”

  —Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 4

  … don’t say that you agree with me. When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.

  —Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 2

  “The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not walk.”

  —Wilde, as quoted in conversation [AAT]

  My dear young lady, there was a great deal of truth, I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important …

  —Lady Hunstanton, A Woman of No Importance, Act 2

  … talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.

  —Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance, Act 3

  If you want to know what a woman really means—which by the way, is always a dangerous thing to do—look at her, don’t listen to her.

  —Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance, Act 3

  I like looking at geniuses, and listening to beautiful people.

  —Mrs. Marchmont, An Ideal Husband, Act 1

  Even in actual life egotism is not without its attractions. When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one can shut up a book of which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.

  —Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 1

  Don’t let us discuss anything solemnly. I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don’t degrade me into the position of giving you useful information.

  —Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 1

  More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is, of course, obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other—by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.

  —Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 1

  How appalling is that ignorance which is the inevitable result of the fatal habit of imparting opinions! How limited in range the creature’s mind proves to be! How it wearies us, and must weary himself, with its endless repetitions and sickly reiteration! How lacking it is in any element of intellectual growth! In what a vicious circle it always moves!

  —Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 2

  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.

  —Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance, Act 1

  Never mind what I say … I am always saying what I shouldn’t say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.

  —Lord Goring, An Ideal Husband, Act 2

  “I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any question—simply curiosity.”

  —Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 6

  Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.

  —Mrs. Cheveley, An Ideal Husband, Act 1

  “What are you thinking?” is the only question that any single civilized being should ever be allowed to whisper to another.

  —Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 2

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

  —Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance, Act 1

  I love political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don’t talk politics.

  —Lord Goring, An Ideal Husband, Act 1

  Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.

  —Lord Darlington, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act 1

  Wonderful woman, Lady Markby, isn’t she? Talks more and says less than anybody I ever met. She is made to be a public speaker.

  —Mrs. Cheveley, An Ideal Husband, Act 2

  “I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.”

  —Dorian Gray, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 12

  I don’t at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.

  —Lord Goring, An Ideal Husband, Act 4

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

  —Cecil Graham, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act 3

  “… there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

  —Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 1

  Chapter 16

  THE END OF WISDOM

  “I wrote when I did not know life. Now that I know the meaning of life, I have no more to write.”

  —Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]

  I think I may say without vanity—though I do not wish to appear to run vanity down—that of all men in England I am the one who requires least advertisement. I am tired to death of being advertised.

  —Letter [June 25, 1890]

  … I believe that at the beginning God made a world for each separate man, and in that world which is within us one should seek to live.

  —Letter from prison [April 1, 1897]

  The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder …

  —De Profundis

  “… I have put my genius into my life—I have put only my talent into my works.”

  —Wilde as quoted in conversation [POW]

  “Well, I’m a very ambitious young man. I want to do everything in the world. I cannot conceive of anything that I do not want to do.”

  —Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]

  “My weakness is that I do what I will and get what I want.”

  —Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]

  … while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong what one becomes.

  —De Profundis

  “I cannot say what I am going to do with my life; I am wondering what my life is going to do with me.”

  —Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]

  “There is no hell but this, a body without a soul, or a soul without a body.”

  —Wilde as quoted in conversation [POW]

  “Praise makes me humble. But when I am abused, I know I have touched the stars.”

  —Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]

  It is a sad thing, but one wearies even of praise.

  —Letter [August 13, 1890]

  “I have never given adoration to anybody except myself.”

  —Wilde, under cross-examination, 1895 [OW]

  How strange to live in a land where the worship of beauty and the passion of love are considered infamous.

  —Letter [November 9, 1894]

  “In Paris I am bad: here I am bored: the last state is worse.”

  —Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]

  Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so.

  —Letter [c. January–February, 1886]

  I don’t think I shall ever write again: la joie de vivre is gone, and that, with will-power, is the basis of art.

  —Letter [March 9, 1898]

  I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say, quite simply and without affectation, that the two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.

  —De Profundis

  I used to think gratitude a burden to carry. Now I know that it is something that makes the heart lighter. The ungrateful man is one who walks slowly with feet and heart of lead. But when one knows the strange joy of gratitude to God and man the earth becomes lovelier to one, and it is a pleasure to count up, not one’s wealth but one’s debts, not the little that one possesses, but the much that one owes.

  —Letter [May 28, 1897]

  It may be a terrible shock to my friends to think that I had abnormal passions, and perverse desires, but if they read history they will find I am not the first artist so doomed, any more than I shall be the last.

  —Letter from prison [April 6, 1897]

  I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the last!

  —Letter [c. January–February, 1886]

  Martyrdom was to me merely a tragic form of skepticism, an attempt to realise by fire what one had failed to do by faith. No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

  —“The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”

  “You will soon be going about like the converted, and the revivalist, warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired.”

  —Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 19

  Charity is not a sentimental emotion: it is the only method by which the soul can attain to any knowledge—to any wisdom.

  —Letter [May 31, 1898]

  “The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.”

  —Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 19

  Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

  —“The Decay of Lying”

  Christ had no patience with the dull lifeless mechanical systems that treat people as if they were things, and so treat everybody alike: for Him there were no laws: there were exceptions merely, as if anybody, or anything, for that matter, was like aught else in the world!

  —De Profundis

  It is a curious, and therefore natural thing, but I cannot stand Christians because they are never Catholics, and I cannot stand Catholics because they are never Christians.

  —Letter [c. June 29, 1900]

  His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be. If the only thing that He ever said had been, “Her sins are forgiven her because she loved much,” it would have been worth while dying to have said it.

  —De
Profundis

  And alien tears will fill for him

  Pity’s long-broken urn,

  For his mourners will be outcast men,

  And outcasts always mourn.

  —“Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Part 4

  (Wilde’s epitaph on his monument in Paris)

  “Where will it all end? Half the world does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me.”