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

by Oscar Wilde

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

Life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.

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.

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

There are two ways of disliking art … One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

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

should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

One should always be a little improbable.

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