Our
husbands
never appreciate anything in us.
Oscar Wilde - Poetry
Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and
self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that
old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the
world, and which even now makes its victims day by day and has its
altars in the land. Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you.
Not I. Not anyone. It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal,
for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by
his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his
martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors and all the bachelors
like married men.
The higher education of men is what I should like to see. Men need it so
sadly.
The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a
middle-class education.
Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of
physical weakness in the old.
Our husbands never appreciate anything in us. We have to go to others
for that.
Most women in London nowadays seem to furnish their rooms with nothing
but orchids, foreigners and French novels.
The canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of
art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a
ceremony as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere
character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such
plays delightful to us. Is sincerity such a terrible thing? I think not.
It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young.
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all
creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse
their rhymes are the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having
published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible.
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry
that they dare not realise.
