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

by Oscar Wilde

We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. 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.

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

The things of nature do not really belong to us; we should leave them to our children as we have received them. In nature there is, for me at any rate, healing power. We all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

It would be unfair to expect other people to be as remarkable as oneself. Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.