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

by Oscar Wilde

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. 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.

To become a work of art is the object of living.

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

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature – it requires, in fact, that nature of a true Individualist – to sympathize with a friend’s success.

If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

Only the shallow know themselves.

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

To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

As soon as people are old enough to know better, they don’t know anything at all.

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 one cares nothing.

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

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover, when it is too late, that the only thing one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.

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

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

Are there not books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?

Men know life too early … Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity … Women have a more subtle instinct about things. What [they] like is to be a man’s last romance.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.