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

by Oscar Wilde

We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art.

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

our ordinary English novelists … fail … in concentration of style. Their characters are far too eloquent and talk themselves to tatters. What we want is a little more reality and a little less rhetoric … we wish that they would talk less and think more.

However, one should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

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.

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.

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 feeling that I have always cultivated. 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.

Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.

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.

The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth. To become a work of art is the object of living.

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

You forget that a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.

Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is...

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.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

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

I remember writing about this in my diary at like 13. Living vs existing / experiencing.

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament … the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman.

In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.

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

Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.

The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.

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 most horrible thing in the world. (On absinthe)

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

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

A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys. To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble, more noble than other forms.

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.

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

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

Recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation.

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

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

Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.

She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.

People never think of cultivating a young girl’s imagination. It is the great defect of modern education.

In the summer term Oxford teaches the exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.

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

I don’t like Switzerland: it has produced nothing but theologians and waiters.

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.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

I disagree entirely

Misunderstanding … is the basis of love.