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

by Oscar Wilde

To me the life of the businessman who eats his breakfast early in the morning, catches a train for the city, stays there in the dingy, dusty atmosphere of the commercial world, and goes back to his house in the evening, and after supper to sleep, is worse than the life of the galley slave – his chains are golden instead of iron.

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.

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a fe...

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.

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 write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

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

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

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.

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

The fact is that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.

Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.

One should always be a little improbable.

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.

After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the ...

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation

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.

Praise makes me humble, but when I am abused I know I have touched the stars.

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

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.

Why should they [the poor] be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.

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

It is the first duty of a gentleman to dream.

My duty to myself is to amuse myself terrifically.

The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship. It starts in the right manner.

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

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

All love is a tragedy.

There is only one real tragedy in a woman’s life. The fact that the past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

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

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

Why is it that one runs to one’s ruin? Why has destruction ...

The things of nature do not really belong to us; we should leave them to our children as we have received them.

I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does to the full. There was no pleasure I did not experience.

It would be unfair to expect other people to be as remarkable as oneself.