People and characters

Personalities, not principles , move the age.

The world is wide, and has many marvelous people in it.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascination - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion.

The people who loves only one in their lives are really the shallow people.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.

A man who is a master of himself can end o sorrow as easily as he can create a pleasure.

If a man treats life artificially, his brain is his heart.

People like the willful sunbeams of life do not commit crimes.

The mind of the thoroughly well - informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

Ugly and stupid people live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without

disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien friends.

Man is many things, but he is not rational.

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy.

If one were to live his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forge all the maladies of madievalism , and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be.

People are afraid of themselves. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. One regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

The probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices. Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.

For any man of culture to accept the standart of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.

None of us can stand other people having the same faults.

No man came across two ideal things. Few come across one. Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is from the noblest motives.

Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

When we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us.

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life.

We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.

To be popular one must be a mediocrity. To be good is to be in harmony with ones self.

When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.

One can always be kind to people about whim one cares nothing.

It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private life.

Society

The canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art.

Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.

The masses feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if anyone of us makes an ass of himself he is poaching on their preserves.

The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing, but self - denial.

We try to solve the problem of slavery by amusing the slaves

Crimes belong exclusively to the lower orders. It was to them what art is to the high society, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.

Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.

Britain

British public are really not equal to the mental strait of heaving more than one topic every months. There is no literacy public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature. If one puts forward an idea to a true Englishmen - always a rash thing to do - he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. The only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes it oneself.

Examinations, sir are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

Mixed group

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.

Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of intellect - simply a confession of failures.

Rouge and esprit used to go together.

Enough is as bad as a meal, more than enough is as good as a feast.

Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.

Religion is the fashionable substitute for Belief.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.

Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one.

The only difference between a caprice and a life - long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer. I choose my friends fir their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to.

There are only two ways by which a man can reach the civilization. One is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt. Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who lives out of town are so absolutely uncivilized.

Moderation is a fatal thing. To define is to limit.

It is only the sacred things that are worth touching.

There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not sends us heralds. She is too wise

or too cruel for that. If one does not talk about a thing it has never happened.

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of Faith.

There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinctions, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through the history the faltering steps of kings.

We shall all suffer for what the gods have given to us, suffer terribly.

Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us.

What the gods give they quickly take away. Good resolutions are simply cheques that the man draw on a bank where they have no account.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.

There is a fatality about good resolutions - that they always made too late.

There is a luxury in self - reproach. The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

There is such thing as a good influence. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.

To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.

The harmony of soul and body - how much that is. People in their madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism, that is vulgar, and ideality, that is void.

We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not courage to yield to.

You do anything to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of Science is that it is not emotional.

The only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact.

The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. As for the lives of one's neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan one can flaunt one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern.

Credit is the capital of a younger son, and one lives charmingly upon it.

When good Americans die they go to Paris and when bad Americans die they go to America.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

CONFERENCE

Oscar Wilde Sketch

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 844