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

by Oscar Wilde

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

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

… a poet without hysterics is rare.

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.

Nobody, even in the provinces, should ever be allowed to ask an intelligent question about pure mathematics across a dinner table. A question of this kind is quite as bad as inquiring suddenly about the state of a man’s soul …

But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.

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

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

Missionaries, my dear! Don’t you realize that missionaries are the divinely provided food for destitute and underfed cannibals? Whenever they are on the brink of starvation, Heaven in its infinite mercy sends them a nice plump missionary.

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.

… imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

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

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

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

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

Oh, it is indeed a burning shame that there would be one law for men and another law for women. I think that there should be no law for anybody.

My existence is a scandal.

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

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

By nature and by choice, I am extremely indolent.

I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do – the day after.

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

Every right article of apparel belongs equally to both sexes, and there is absolutely no such thing as a definitely feminine garment.

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

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

[She] talks more and says less than anybody I ever met. She is made to be a public speaker.

My duty to myself is to amuse myself terrifically.

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

The books that the world calls immoral books are books that show the world its own shame.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

To live in happiness, you must know some unhappiness in life.

What fire does not destroy, it hardens.

Suffering and the community of suffering makes people kind.

Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.

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

Of course I plagiarize. It is the privilege of the appreciative man.

There are two ways of disliking my plays. One is to dislike them, the other is to like Earnest.

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.

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

It would be unfair to expect other people to be as rema...

Only dull people are brilliant a...