Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast (Penguin Little Black Classics, #119)

by Oscar Wilde

Well, the secret of life is in art.

I have always been of the opinion that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative

…

The true dramatist … shows us life under the conditions of art, not art in the form of life.

Language is the noblest instrument we have, either for the revealing or the concealing of thought; talk itself is a

sort of spiritualized action; and conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.

Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

I have always been of opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.

I have made an important discovery … that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effects of intoxication.

Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life … Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realizes in fact what has been dreamed in fiction.

imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult.

All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.

It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal. I hope you will never fall into that error. If you do, you will be sorry for it.

It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.

Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that he cannot realize his ideal.

But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other th...

The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

One should always be a little improbable.

There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon.

The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always...

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inarticulate manner that they hurt one by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

The aim of love is to love: no more, and no less.

What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry,...

… all great ideas are dangerous.

By nature and by choice, I am extremely indolent.

If I were all alone, marooned on some desert island and had my things with me, I should dress for dinner every evening.

I now understand that pity is the greatest and the most beautiful thing that there is in the world.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

Neil?? Is that you?

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

One can always be kind to people about whom on...

without freedom there is no such thing as beauty in dress at all.

I think a man should invent his own myth.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

The desire for beauty is merely a heightened form of the desire for life.

Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination.

Conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.

The maxim ‘If you find the company dull, blame yourself’ seems to us somewhat optimistic.

A man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world.

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.