Vulgar habit that is people have
nowadays
of asking one, after one has
given them an idea, whether one is serious or not.
given them an idea, whether one is serious or not.
Oscar Wilde - Poetry
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.
