Current page: 1 (book has 5 pages in total) [available reading passage: 1 pages]
Oscar Wilde
Aphorisms
Apart from himself, there is absolutely no one to exchange a word with.
Oscar Wilde
Multiple dates
1874. Wilde begins his studies at Madeleine College (Oxford). “There were two turning points in my life: when my father sent me to Oxford and when society sent me to prison.”
1878. Graduation from college.
1882. Wilde tours America “to trim the barbaric talons of the American eagle with the scissors of culture.” Upon entering the country, he was asked what valuables he wanted to indicate on the customs declaration. “I have nothing to declare except my genius,” Wilde replied.
1883. First trip to Paris.
1884. Wilde marries Constance Lloyd.
1885. Wilde becomes editor of the magazine "Women's World".
1886. Publication of the book “The Happy Prince and Other Tales”.
1889. Wilde's essay "The Decline of Lies" is published.
1891. The Picture of Dorian Gray is published.
1892. After the premiere of the comedy “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” the author addressed the audience with the words: “I congratulate you on the great success of the play; this convinced me that you have almost as high an opinion of my play as I do myself.”
1893. The comedy “A Woman Not Worth Attention” was staged. The drama “Salome” was published in France; in England it is prohibited from production.
January – February 1895. The huge success of the comedies “An Ideal Husband” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
April – May 1895. Wilde's arrest and conviction for a "crime against public morals." “Everything in my tragedy was disgusting, vulgar, disgusting, unstylish.”
1895 – 1897. Two-year prison sentence. “If England treats all her prisoners the same way she treats me, she doesn’t deserve to have them at all.”
1897. After leaving prison, Wilde settled in France. "I have alreadyI will not make a single new friend in my life, but I will probably make several friends after my death.”
1898. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" was published without the author's name.
November 30, 1900. Death of Oscar Wilde. “Do you want to know what the greatest drama of my life is? I put my genius into my life, and just my talent into my books.”
A plaque on Wilde's house in London states:
Wilde about himself
I have unpretentious taste: the best is enough for me.
* * *
I edited my poem for half a day and crossed out one comma. In the evening I played it again.
* * *
Alas, half of humanity does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me.
* * *
Reality always appears to me through a haze of words. I will sacrifice authenticity for the sake of a successful phrase and am ready to sacrifice truth for the sake of a good aphorism.
* * *
Actually, I don't like playing outdoors. Except for dominoes. I played several games of dominoes in cafes on the Parisian boulevards.
* * *
I never walk and correspond only by telegraph.
* * *
* * *
I put all the systems into one phrase, and my whole life into one aphorism.
About men and women
I love men with a future and women with a past.
* * *
Women are in a much more advantageous position than men: there are more prohibitions for them.
* * *
Men learn life too early, and women too late, that’s almost the whole difference between them.
* * *
For the philosopher, women represent the triumph of matter over spirit, and men - the triumph of spirit over morality.
* * *
Women usually hold all the trump cards, but always lose the last bet.
* * *
Women give men the most precious things in life. But they invariably demand it back - and all in the smallest coin.
* * *
Women treat us men the same way humanity treats their gods: they worship us and bother us, constantly demanding something.
* * *
Men think. Women only think that they think.
* * *
All women eventually become like their mothers. This is their tragedy. No man is like his mother. This is his tragedy.
Do you know how great a woman's curiosity is? It is almost as good as men's.
* * *
You can always trust a woman because she doesn’t remember anything important.
* * *
A woman can make a man righteous in only one way: to bore him so much that he loses all interest in life.
* * *
The woman begins by repelling the man's advance, and ends by cutting off his path to retreat.
* * *
In fact, women love it when men are poorly dressed. They are always a little afraid of the dandy and want the man's appearance to speak against him.
* * *
Women are extremely practical people. They are much more practical than us. In elevated moments, a man often forgets to talk about marriage, but a woman always reminds him of this.
* * *
Do not let yourself be led astray from the unrighteous path! Virtuous you will be unbearably boring. This is what makes me angry about women. Be sure to give them a good man. Moreover, if he is good from the very beginning, they will never love him. They need to love him as bad and leave him as disgustingly good.
* * *
– Who do you consider spoiled?
- Those men who admire innocence.
– What about spoiled women?
- Oh, those women who never tire of men.
* * *
Nothing hurts a romance more than a woman's sense of humor or a man's lack of it.
* * *
You should never give a woman something that she cannot wear in the evenings.
* * *
Men get older, but they don't get better.
* * *
Women are created to be loved, not to be understood.
* * *
The woman is a sphinx without riddles.
* * *
Femininity is the quality I most admire in women.
If you want to know what a woman really thinks, look at her, but don't listen.
* * *
The woman is not thinking about anything or thinking about anything else.
* * *
Women are a decorative floor. They have nothing to talk about, but everything they say is charming.
* * *
The history of women is the history of the worst kind of tyranny the world has ever known. Tyranny of the weak over the strong. This is the only form of tyranny that still stands.
* * *
Perhaps cruelty, outright cruelty is dearest to women: their primitive instincts are surprisingly strong. We gave them freedom, but they still remained slaves looking for a master. They love to submit.
* * *
Women just have amazing instincts. They notice everything except the most obvious.
* * *
Women in real life are wonderful actresses, but they have no artistic flair. They want to continue the performance when all interest in it has already disappeared. If they were given free rein, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would turn into a farce.
* * *
The beauty of the past is that it is the past. And women never notice that the curtain has fallen. Definitely give them the sixth act!
* * *
With bad women you don’t know peace, but with good women you feel bored. That's the whole difference.
* * *
A woman's first duty is to please her dressmaker. What her second duty is has not yet been clarified.
* * *
Women are divided into two categories - those without makeup and those with makeup. The first ones are very useful to us. If you want to gain a reputation as an honorable person, all you have to do is invite such a woman to have dinner with you.
* * *
Only a truly good woman can do a truly stupid thing.
* * *
A woman with a past has no future.
* * *
A woman without cute mistakes is not a woman, but a female person.
* * *
London society is full of women of the most distinguished birth who, by their own choice, remain thirty years of age for many years in a row.
* * *
If a woman has achieved the fact that she looks ten years younger than her daughter, she is quite satisfied with this.
* * *
She is still thirty-five years old since she turned forty.
* * *
You can't trust a woman who doesn't hide her age. Such a woman can tell anything.
* * *
A woman should never be too precise in determining her age. This smacks of pedantry.
* * *
She was created to be the wife of a messenger. She has an amazing ability to remember people's names and forget their faces.
* * *
Yesterday she wore a lot of blush, but very little dress. In a woman this is always a sign of despair.
* * *
Dear child! She loves photographs so much, especially views of Switzerland. Extremely chaste taste.
* * *
She can speak brilliantly about any subject, provided she knows nothing about it.
* * *
Many women have pasts, but she is said to have at least a dozen.
* * *
Even in old age she retained traces of her amazing ugliness.
* * *
It is curious that ugly women are always jealous of their husbands, but beautiful women are never jealous. Beautiful women have no time for that - they are jealous of other people's husbands.
* * *
Tears are a refuge for ugly women, but ruin for pretty women.
* * *
Beauty is one of the types of Genius, it is even higher than Genius, because it does not require understanding.
* * *
Beauty is a gift for several years.
* * *
Ugliness is one of the seven mortal virtues.
* * *
Nowadays, a woman is not allowed to flirt before the age of forty or have romantic feelings before the age of forty-five.
* * *
It's terrible how women have become calculating. No doubt, our grandmothers also happened to indulge in all serious things, but their granddaughters will certainly first figure out what it will give them.
* * *
We are all impoverished now, so compliments are the only offering we can afford.
* * *
Women cannot be disarmed by a compliment. Men - yes. This is the difference.
* * *
A woman will flirt with anyone as long as they look at her at the time.
* * *
If a man has ever loved a woman, he will do anything for her. Except for only one thing: continue to love her.
* * *
Love always promises the impossible and makes you believe in the impossible.
* * *
Love feeds on repetition, and only repetition turns simple lust into art.
* * *
The only difference between a whim and “eternal love” is that the whim lasts a little longer.
* * *
Real great passion is quite rare these days. This is the privilege of people who have nothing better to do.
* * *
Great passion is the only thing the non-working classes are capable of.
* * *
True love forgives all crimes except crimes against love.
* * *
Falling in love begins with a person deceiving himself, and ends with him deceiving another.
* * *
She was always in love with someone - and always hopelessly, so she retained all her illusions.
* * *
It is very difficult not to be unfair to someone you love.
* * *
The object of passion changes, but passion always remains one and only.
* * *
Someone said about women that they “love with their ears.” And men love with their eyes.
* * *
It is no good to be like Narcissus, bending over a photograph; even water cannot be trusted; the eyes of a lover are the only reliable mirror.
* * *
Women love us for our flaws. If there are a fair amount of these shortcomings, they are ready to forgive us everything, even our intelligence.
* * *
It is very dangerous to meet a woman who completely understands you. This usually ends in marriage.
* * *
A man can be happy with any woman, unless he is in love with her.
* * *
It is better to adore than to be adored. Tolerating someone's adoration is boring and painful.
* * *
They loved me passionately, madly. And it's a shame. This was incredibly disruptive to my life. I wouldn't mind having a little free time sometimes.
* * *
A man always wants to be a woman's first love. Women are more sensitive in such matters. They would like to become a man's last love.
* * *
“I like her very much, but I’m not in love with her.”
“And she’s in love with you, although she doesn’t like you very much.”
* * *
– How long could you love a woman who doesn’t love you?
– Which one doesn’t love? All life.
* * *
Loyalty! Someday I will analyze this feeling. It contains the greed of the owner. We would willingly give up many things if it were not for the fear that someone else would pick it up.
* * *
If you are away for a short time, I am ready to wait for you all my life.
* * *
I consider superficial people to be those who love only once in their life. Their so-called loyalty and constancy are just lethargy of habit or lack of imagination.
* * *
The love of a married woman is a great thing. Married men never dreamed of this.
* * *
Those who are faithful in love only have access to its banal essence. The tragedy of love is experienced only by those who cheat.
* * *
Self-love is the beginning of a romance that lasts a lifetime.
* * *
You must always be in love. This is why you should never get married.
* * *
Nowadays all decent people get married. Bachelors are no longer in fashion. Discredited public. Too much is known about them.
* * *
Now all married men live like bachelors, and all single men live like married men.
* * *
A man who stubbornly refuses to get married turns into a constant public temptation.
* * *
Men often propose just for practice.
* * *
Usually it is not the man who proposes to the woman, but she who proposes to him. Only in bourgeois circles is it different. But the bourgeoisie is behind the times.
* * *
I don't approve of long engagements. This gives an opportunity to get to know the other party's character, which I don't think is advisable.
* * *
If we men married the women we are worth, we would have a bad time!
* * *
Men marry out of fatigue, women marry out of curiosity. Both are disappointed.
* * *
Niagara Falls is the second disappointment of the newlywed.
* * *
Marriage has the same destructive effect on a person as cigarettes, but it costs a lot more.
* * *
A woman remarries only if her first husband was disgusting to her. And a man marries again only because he loved his first wife very much.
* * *
I didn't say he was getting married. I just said that he going marry. This is far from the same thing. For example, I clearly remember that I got married, but I don’t remember at all that I was going to marry. And I am inclined to think that I never had such an intention.
* * *
Never marry women with straw-colored hair - they are terribly sentimental.
* * *
Women seek happiness in marriage, men put theirs at stake.
* * *
The strongest foundation for marriage is mutual misunderstanding.
* * *
A married man's happiness depends on those he is not married to.
* * *
Modern women understand everything except their husbands.
* * *
I am a married man, and the beauty of marriage is that both parties inevitably have to become more sophisticated in their lies.
* * *
There are too many women in London who believe their husbands. You can immediately recognize them - they look so unhappy.
* * *
Twenty years of love makes a woman a wreck; Twenty years of marriage give it the appearance of a public building.
* * *
The only thing worse than a marriage without love is a marriage in which love exists only on one side.
* * *
You can immediately determine whether a man has a family or not. I have often noticed a very sad look in the eyes of many married men.
* * *
Women have become so educated that nothing surprises them anymore - except a happy marriage.
* * *
These days it is dangerous for a husband to show his wife any attention in public. This makes everyone think that he is hitting her in private. People are so suspicious these days of anything that looks like a happy marriage.
* * *
Family breaks up more often because of the husband's sanity than because of anything else. How can a woman be happy with a man who stubbornly wants to see her as a completely rational being?
* * *
Polygamy? How much more poetic is it to have one spouse and love many.
* * *
She is so indifferent to me, as if I were her husband.
* * *
She changed husbands more than once, but kept one lover, and therefore the gossip about her stopped long ago.
* * *
When a woman feels that her husband is indifferent to her, she begins to dress too loudly and tastelessly, or she gets very elegant hats, which someone else’s husband pays for.
* * *
After burying her third husband, she became blonde out of despair.
* * *
Keeping secrets from other people's wives is a necessary luxury in our time. But trying to hide something from your wife is unforgivable frivolity. She'll find out anyway.
* * *
The accessibility of divorce has at least the advantage that it introduces a new element of romantic instability into the marriage union. When a couple is married until the end of their lives, how often courtesy becomes pure excess, and gallantry means nothing at all.
* * *
Divorces are made in heaven.
Women's conversations
“In my opinion, a husband shouldn’t be too charming.” Is it dangerous.
“My child, a husband is never too charming!”
* * *
– You are not a master at giving compliments. I'm afraid that your wife does not encourage you in this useful habit. This is a big mistake on her part. When a man stops saying nice words, his thoughts change accordingly.
* * *
“I hope you are not leading a double life, pretending to be dissolute when you are actually virtuous.” That would be hypocrisy.
* * *
– It's good that you smoke. Every man needs something to do. There are too many idle people in London anyway.
* * *
– I adore men over seventy. They always offer women love until the grave. In my opinion, seventy is the ideal age for a man.
* * *
– Good husbands are unbearably boring, bad husbands are terribly arrogant.
* * *
- All men are monsters. Women have only one thing left to do – feed them better.
* * *
“The surest consolation is to win away a suitor from another when you lose your own.” In high society this always rehabilitates a woman.
* * *
– To win a man, a woman only needs to awaken the worst that is in him. You make a god out of a man, and he leaves you. The other makes a beast out of him, and he licks her hands and does not leave her side.
* * *
“It’s just outrageous how many women in London flirt with their own husbands.” This is very disgusting. It’s like washing clean clothes in public.
* * *
– I love eavesdropping through keyholes. You will learn so many interesting things.
“Don’t you think it means to tempt providence?”
“Oh, he’s been tempted so many times already.” It's probably gotten used to it.
* * *
– It’s not love at first sight, but love at the end of the season is much more reliable.
* * *
– I am unchanged in everything except my feelings.
* * *
– This uncertainty is terrible. I wish it wouldn't end longer.
* * *
“Margaret has become very prettier.” The last time I saw her, twenty years ago, she was a freak in diapers.
* * *
– The former respect for youth is quickly dying out. I lost any influence on my mother at the age of three.
* * *
“I believe that if a mother does not part with at least one daughter every season, then she has no heart.”
* * *
– This governess is too beautiful to be kept in a decent house.
* * *
– No, I’m not cynical, I just have experience – however, it’s the same thing.
* * *
– I like to listen to myself. For me this is one of the greatest pleasures. Sometimes I have very long conversations with myself, and I must admit, I am so educated and smart that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I say.
* * *
– I don’t go anywhere without a diary. You should always have something exciting to read on the train.
* * *
– Being natural is a very difficult pose – you won’t be able to stand it for long!
* * *
– I don’t order orchids, it’s beyond my means, but I don’t spare money on foreigners - they give the living room such a picturesque look!
* * *
“The ideal man should speak to us like goddesses and treat us like children.”
He must refuse us all serious requests and indulge all our whims.
He must always say something different from what he thinks, and think something different from what he says.
He shouldn't neglect other pretty women. This would prove that he has no taste, or would raise the suspicion that he has too much taste.
He must always praise us for qualities that we do not have.
But he must be merciless, completely merciless, condemning us for such virtues that we have never even dreamed of.
He must not believe that we need anything useful. That would be unforgivable. But he must shower us with everything that we do not need at all.
He must constantly compromise us in public and be extremely respectful to us in private.
And the reward for all this will be for him the opportunity to hope endlessly.
* * *
– In my opinion, a man is not capable of development. He has already reached the highest point - and God knows how high.
Best Oscar Wilde QuotesOutstanding English writer, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde was born on October 16
A master of spectacular aphorisms and ingenious paradoxes, Oscar Wilde is one of the most quoted classics on the Internet. So did his friend Bernard Shaw.
A witty, handsome man with long hair, Oscar Wilde was a favorite of society during his lifetime. The writer's contemporaries claimed that in his presence they paid no attention to anyone else. An excellent conversationalist, a skilled speaker, witty, with perfect diction, he charmed listeners with his lectures and stories. Many of them remained unwritten: Wilde was not in the habit of writing down everything that came to his mind.
Even before making a name for himself in literature, Oscar Wilde revolutionized fashion. He appeared in society in his own mind-blowing outfits. Today it was short culottes and silk stockings, tomorrow - a vest embroidered with flowers, the day after tomorrow - lemon gloves combined with a lush lace frill. An indispensable accessory was a carnation in the buttonhole, painted green.
Discarding all religious and moral prejudices, Oscar Wilde glorified the cult of beauty. In Victorian England of the 19th century, this was unforgivably shocking.
At the beginning of 1882, Wilde went to conquer America. He got off the ship in the port of New York and, in Wildean style, said to the reporters who swooped on him: “Gentlemen, the ocean has disappointed me, it is not at all as majestic as I thought.” While going through customs procedures, when asked if he had anything to declare, he replied: “I have nothing to declare except my genius.” He was confident in his irresistibility and his talent.
The flamboyant and narcissistic Oscar Wilde often heard harsh criticism, ridicule and accusations of immorality addressed to him. He either ignored the offenders, going into creativity, or came out of the situation with brilliance and Wildean wit. However, intelligence and oratorical abilities did not save the writer at the fateful trial, where he was convicted of homosexual relations and sent to hard labor.
Prison broke Oscar Wilde mentally and physically. But she couldn’t kill the esthete in him to the core. In exile, under someone else's name, dying in a run-down hotel in poverty, obscurity and loneliness, he said: “Either I, or this vile flowered wallpaper.”
The works of Oscar Wilde - “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, “An Ideal Husband”, “An Unworthy Woman”, “Lady Windermere’s Fan” and others - have been dismantled into quotes all over the world. Bright Side presents the most significant of them, from which you can easily create an image of the London dandy, esthete and philosopher Oscar Wilde.
About people
* Most of us are not us. Our thoughts are other people's judgments; our life is mimicry; our passions - quote!
* We cannot stand people with the same shortcomings as us.
* You love everyone, and loving everyone means loving no one. You are equally indifferent to everyone.
* Positive people get on your nerves, bad people get on your imagination.
* Lies are other people's truths.
* A cynic is a person who knows the price of everything and values nothing.
* A person is very embarrassed when he speaks on his own behalf. Give him a mask and he will tell you the whole truth.
* To be good means to live in harmony with yourself.
* There is a kind of voluptuousness in self-flagellation. And when we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has the right to blame us anymore.
* <...>a person who has no enemies, but they are successfully replaced by friends who secretly hate him.
* Only empty people know themselves.
About success
* The world is divided into two classes - some believe in the incredible, others do the impossible.
* Moderation is a fatal quality. Only extremes lead to success.
* Great success always requires some unscrupulousness in funds.
* Ambition is the last refuge of losers.
* People call their mistakes experience.
* Be yourself, the rest of the roles are taken.
About relationships
* Falling in love begins with a person deceiving himself, and ends with him deceiving another.
* It's not bad if friendship begins with laughter, and it's best if it ends with it.
* Selfishness does not mean living the way you want, it is a requirement for others to live the way you want.
* Friendship between a man and a woman is impossible. Passion, enmity, adoration, love - just not friendship.
About old age
* The tragedy of old age is not that a person grows old, but that he remains young at heart.
* To regain youth, you just have to repeat all its follies.
About Me
* I like to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.
* I don't really want to know what people say behind my back. This flatters me too much.
* I love men with a future and women with a past.
* Fashionable is what you wear. And what others wear is unfashionable.
* We're all in the gutter, but some are looking at the stars.
* The only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it.
About religion
* Religion is a very common substitute for faith.
* Truths of faith are believed not because they are reasonable, but because they are often repeated.
* A prayer must remain unanswered, otherwise it ceases to be a prayer and becomes a correspondence.
About women
* You should never trust a woman who tells you her age. A woman who is capable of this is capable of anything.
* If a woman wears a lot of blush and very little dress, this is a sign of desperation.
* The strength of a woman is that it cannot be explained using psychology. Men can be analyzed, women can only be adored.
* Women love us for our flaws. If there are a fair amount of these shortcomings, they are ready to forgive us everything, even our minds...
* As one witty Frenchman said, women inspire us to do great things, but always prevent us from doing them.
* With bad women you don’t know peace, but with good women you feel bored.
* Women exist to be loved, not to be understood.
About marriage
* The main harm of marriage is that it eradicates selfishness from a person. And unselfish people are colorless, they lose their individuality.
* Men marry out of fatigue, women marry out of curiosity. For both, marriage brings disappointment.
* Loyalty! It contains the greed of the owner. We would willingly give up many things if it were not for the fear that someone else would pick it up.
* The strongest foundation for marriage is mutual misunderstanding.
About life
* Only that life that has stopped in its development can be considered broken.
* There are only two real tragedies in life: one is when you don’t get what you want, and the second is when you get it.
* People always laugh at their tragedies - that's the only way to bear them.
* Life is too caustic. She destroys art.
* The purpose of life is self-expression. To manifest our essence in its entirety is what we live for.
When a woman marries for the second time, it means that she hated her first husband; When a man remarries, it is because he adored his first wife.
Men marry out of boredom, women out of curiosity. Both are disappointed.
Marriage without love is terrible. But there is something even worse: this is a marriage in which love is present, but only on one side; fidelity, but only on one side... in such a marriage, out of two hearts, one is undoubtedly broken.
Loyalty
Loyalty in love is entirely a matter of physiology; it does not depend at all on our will. Young people want to be faithful - and they are not, old people would like to change, but where can they be?
Enemy
Enemies should be chosen with special care.
Stupidity
Whenever a person commits stupidity, he does it from the most noble motives.
Sins
There is only one sin - stupidity.
Having sinned, a person gets rid of the attraction to sin, for fulfillment is the path to purification.
Democracy
Modern democracy has only one dangerous enemy - the good monarch.
Children
The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
At first, children love their parents, but over time, however, they begin to judge them and rarely, very rarely forgive them.
Children begin with love for their parents. As they grow up, they begin to judge them. Sometimes they forgive them.
Good
When Good is powerless, it is Evil.
Virtue
Everyone praises those virtues in which he himself does not need to practice: the rich preach frugality, and the idle eloquently spread about the great importance of work.
Soul
The soul is born old and gradually becomes younger. This is the comedic side of life. The body is born young and gradually ages. And this is the tragic side.
Women
If you want to know what a woman really thinks, look at her, but don't listen.
A woman has an amazing instinct: they are ready to detect anything, except for the obvious.
Women inspire us to create masterpieces, but they prevent our inspiration from being realized.
Women treat us men the same way humanity treats their gods: they worship us and bother us, constantly demanding something.
How can a woman be happy with a man who considers her an absolutely rational being?
Every woman is a rebel by nature, and she rebels exclusively against herself.
You should never trust a woman who tells you her age. A woman capable of this is capable of anything.
Ugly women are always jealous of their husbands; beautiful people have no time for that, they are jealous of strangers.
Only a truly good woman can do a truly stupid thing.
Life
Life is too serious a thing to talk about seriously.
The purpose of life is self-expression. To reveal our essence in its entirety is what we live for.
Intuition
A woman has amazing intuition: she can guess everything except the most obvious.
Sincerity
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, but absolute sincerity is simply fatal.
Art
For an artist, a person’s moral life is only one of the themes of his work. The ethics of art lies in the perfect use of imperfect means.
Life is short, art is endless.
The benefit that art gives us is not in what we learn, but in what we become, thanks to it.
Temptation
The only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it.
True
Truth is rarely pure and never unambiguous.
Story
Our only duty to history is to constantly rewrite it.
Books
There are no moral or immoral books. There are books that are well written or poorly written.
Logics
I hate logic; it is always banal and often convincing.
Love
What stupidity this Love is. It does not have half the benefit that Logic has.
Love should forgive all sins, but not the sin against love.
Curiosity
Do you know how great a woman's curiosity is? Almost the same as men's.
Society has a truly insatiable curiosity about everything that does not deserve curiosity.
Dreams
Only people of action have more illusions than dreamers. They have no idea why they are doing something or what will come of it.
Prayers
Prayer must remain unanswered, otherwise it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
Morality
A man who reads morals is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who reads morals is certainly an ugly woman.
Wisdom
In our age we read too much, it prevents us from being wise.
Men
A man can be happy with any woman - provided that he does not love her.
Thoughts
A thought that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called a thought.
About Me
I don’t want to know what they say about me behind my back; I already have a high enough opinion of myself.
I can handle everything except temptation.
Education
Education is an excellent thing, but it is good sometimes to remember that nothing that one should know can be taught.
Optimism
Optimism is based on pure fear.
Those who pretend to be good are taken seriously by the world. Those who pretend to be bad are not. Such is the boundless stupidity of optimists.
Vices
The biggest vice is superficiality.
Actions
With every extraordinary act we make an enemy for ourselves. To gain popularity, you have to be mediocre.
Poetry
Bad poetry always arises from sincere feeling.
Is it true
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
If a person speaks the truth, sooner or later he will be exposed.
Punctuality
Punctuality is the thief of time.
Jealousy
Ugly women are jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women have nothing to do with it - they are busy being jealous of other people's husbands.
Religion
Religion dies the moment its infallibility is proven.
Romance
Nothing hinders a romance more than a woman's sense of humor or a man's lack of it.
Skepticism
Skepticism is the beginning of faith.
Glory
Popularity is the laurel wreath bestowed by the world on base art. Everything that is popular is bad.
Laughter
Laughter is a good start to friendship, and laughter is a good way to end it.
I always pass on good advice to others. There is nothing more to do with them.
Justice
The only thing worse than injustice is justice without a punishing sword.
Life is never fair. For most of us, it's probably better this way.
Old age
The tragedy of old age is not that you are old, but that you are not young.
Happiness
When we are happy, we are always kind; but when we are kind, we are not always happy.
With freedom, flowers, books and the moon - how can you not be completely happy?
An egoist is someone who loves himself more than me.
Selfishness does not mean living the way you want, it is a requirement for others to live the way you want.
Ethics
Interest in ethical issues is evidence of delayed mental development.
on other topics
Most of us are not us. Our thoughts are other people's judgments: our life is mimicry; our passions - quote!
To be good means to live in harmony with yourself.
Questions are never indiscreet. Unlike the answers.
A good half of modern culture is based on what should not be read.
The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that a saint has a past and a sinner has a future.
If a person judges something sensibly, this is a sure sign that he himself is incompetent in this area.
If something is worth doing, it is only what is considered impossible.
When you have winning cards in your hand, you should play fairly.
The world has always laughed at its tragedies, because this is the only way to bear them. Accordingly, everything that the world has always taken seriously belongs to the comedic side of life.
We prefer to think well of others because we are terribly afraid for ourselves.
It is very easy to change others, but it is much more difficult to change yourself.
Only the most undiscerning people do not judge by appearance.
Self-sacrifice must be punished by law. It demoralizes those for whom they make sacrifices.
Anyone can empathize with the suffering of a friend, but only an unusually subtle nature can empathize with success.
Old people believe everything, middle-aged people suspect everything, young people know everything.
Those who look back on their past do not deserve the future.
Philosophical systems crumble like sand, religions fall one after another like dry autumn leaves; but what is beautiful is the treasure of eternity and joy for all time.
To be natural, you need to be able to pretend.
Oscar Wilde, (1854–1900), English writer
About Me
I have unpretentious taste: the best is enough for me.
I edited my poem for half a day and crossed out one comma. In the evening I played it again.
Alas, half of humanity does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me.
Reality always appears to me through a haze of words. I will sacrifice authenticity for the sake of a successful phrase and am ready to sacrifice truth for the sake of a good aphorism.
Actually, I don't like playing outdoors. Except for dominoes. I played several games of dominoes in cafes on the Parisian boulevards.
I never walk and correspond only by telegraph.
I put all the systems into one phrase, and my whole life into one aphorism.
About men and women
I love men with a future and women with a past.
Women are in a much more advantageous position than men: there are more prohibitions for them.
Men learn life too early, and women too late, that’s almost the whole difference between them.
For the philosopher, women represent the triumph of matter over spirit, and men - the triumph of spirit over morality.
Women usually hold all the trump cards, but always lose the last bet.
Women give men the most precious things in life. But they invariably demand it back - and all in the smallest coin.
Women treat us men the same way as humanity treats its gods: they worship us and bother us, constantly demanding something.
Men think. Women only think that they think.
All women eventually become like their mothers. This is their tragedy. No man is like his mother. This is his tragedy.
Do you know how great a woman's curiosity is? It is almost as good as men's.
You can always trust a woman because she doesn’t remember anything important.
A woman can make a man righteous in only one way: to bore him so much that he loses all interest in life.
The woman begins by repelling the man's advance, and ends by cutting off his path to retreat.
In fact, women love it when men are poorly dressed. They are always a little afraid of the dandy and want the man's appearance to speak against him.
Women are extremely practical people. They are much more practical than us. In elevated moments, a man often forgets to talk about marriage, but a woman always reminds him of this.
Do not let yourself be led astray from the unrighteous path! Virtuous you will be unbearably boring. This is what makes me angry about women. Be sure to give them a good man. Moreover, if he is good from the very beginning, they will never love him. They need to love him as bad and leave him as disgustingly good.
– Who do you consider spoiled?
- Those men who admire innocence.
– What about spoiled women?
- Oh, those women who never tire of men.
Nothing harms a romance more than in a woman or the lack of it in a man.
You should never give a woman something that she cannot wear in the evenings.
Men get older, but they don't get better.
Women are created to be loved, not to be understood.
The woman is a sphinx without riddles.
Femininity is the quality I most admire in women.
If you want to know what a woman really thinks, look at her, but don't listen.
The woman does not think about anything or thinks about anything else.
Women are a decorative floor. They have nothing to talk about, but everything they say is charming.
The history of women is the history of the worst kind of tyranny the world has ever known. Tyranny of the weak over the strong. This is the only form of tyranny that still stands.
Perhaps cruelty, outright cruelty is dearest to women: their primitive instincts are surprisingly strong. We gave them freedom, but they still remained slaves looking for a master. They love to submit.
Women just have amazing instincts. They notice everything except the most obvious.
Women in real life are wonderful actresses, but they have no artistic flair. They want to continue the performance when all interest in it has already disappeared. If they were given free rein, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would turn into a farce.
The beauty of the past is that it is... And women never notice that the curtain has fallen. Definitely give them the sixth act!
With bad women you don’t know peace, but with good women you feel bored. That's the whole difference.
A woman's first duty is to please her dressmaker. What her second duty is has not yet been clarified.
Women are divided into two categories - those without makeup and those with makeup. The first ones are very useful to us. If you want to gain a reputation as an honorable person, all you have to do is invite such a woman to have dinner with you.
Only a truly good woman can do a truly stupid thing.
A woman with a past has no future.
A woman without cute mistakes is not a woman, but a female person.
London society is full of women of the most distinguished birth who, by their own choice, remain thirty years of age for many years in a row.
If a woman has achieved the fact that she looks ten years younger than her daughter, she is quite satisfied with this.
She is still thirty-five years old since she turned forty.
You can't trust a woman who doesn't hide her age. Such a woman can tell anything.
A woman should never be too precise in determining her age. This smacks of pedantry.
She was created to be the wife of a messenger. She has an amazing ability to remember people's names and forget their faces.
Yesterday she wore a lot of blush, but very little dress. In a woman this is always a sign of despair.
Dear child! She loves photographs so much, especially views of Switzerland. Extremely chaste taste.
She can speak brilliantly about any subject, provided she knows nothing about it.
Many women have pasts, but she is said to have at least a dozen.
Even in old age she retained traces of her amazing ugliness.
It is curious that ugly women are always jealous of their husbands, but beautiful women are never jealous. Beautiful women have no time for that - they are jealous of other people's husbands.
Tears are a refuge for ugly women, but ruin for pretty women.
Beauty is one of the types of Genius, it is even higher than Genius, because it does not require understanding.
Beauty is a gift for several years.
Ugliness is one of the seven mortal virtues.
Nowadays, a woman is not allowed to flirt before the age of forty or have romantic feelings before the age of forty-five.
It's terrible how women have become calculating. No doubt, our grandmothers also happened to indulge in all serious things, but their granddaughters will certainly first figure out what it will give them.
We are all impoverished now, so compliments are the only offering we can afford.
Women cannot be disarmed by a compliment. Men - yes. This is the difference.
A woman will flirt with anyone as long as they look at her at the time.
If a man once loved a woman, he will do anything for her. Except for only one thing: continue to love her.
Love always promises the impossible and makes you believe in the impossible.
Love feeds on repetition, and only repetition turns simple lust into art.
The only difference between a whim and “eternal love” is that the whim lasts a little longer.
Real great passion is quite rare these days. This is the privilege of people who have nothing better to do.
Great passion is the only thing the non-working classes are capable of.
True love forgives all crimes except crimes against love.
Falling in love begins with a person deceiving himself, and ends with him deceiving another.
She was always in love with someone - and always hopelessly, so she kept all her dreams.
It is very difficult not to be unfair to someone you love.
The object of passion changes, but passion always remains one and only.
Someone said about women that they “love with their ears.” And men love with their eyes.
It is no good to be like Narcissus, bending over a photograph; even water cannot be trusted; the eyes of a lover are the only reliable mirror.
Women love us for our flaws. If there are a fair amount of these shortcomings, they are ready to forgive us everything, even our intelligence.
It is very dangerous to meet a woman who completely understands you. This usually ends in marriage.
A man can be happy with any woman, unless he is in love with her.
It is better to adore than to be adored. Someone's adoration is boring and painful.
They loved me passionately, madly. And it's a shame. This was incredibly disruptive to my life. I wouldn't mind having a little free time sometimes.
A man always wants to be a woman's first love. Women are more sensitive in such matters. They would like to become a man's last love.
“I like her very much, but I’m not in love with her.”
“And she’s in love with you, although she doesn’t like you very much.”
– How long could you love a woman who doesn’t love you?
– Which one doesn’t love? All life.
Loyalty! Someday I will analyze this feeling. It contains the greed of the owner. We would willingly give up many things if it were not for the fear that someone else would pick it up.
If you are away for a short time, I am ready to wait for you all my life.
I consider superficial people to be those who love only once in their life. Their so-called loyalty and constancy are just lethargy of habit or lack of imagination.
The love of a married woman is a great thing. Married men never dreamed of this.
Those who are faithful in love only have access to its banal essence. The tragedy of love is experienced only by those who cheat.
Self-love is the beginning of a romance that lasts a lifetime.
You must always be in love. This is why you should never get married.
Nowadays all decent people get married. Bachelors are no longer in fashion. Discredited public. Too much is known about them.
Now all married men live like bachelors, and all single men live like married men.
A man who stubbornly refuses to get married turns into a constant public temptation.
Men often propose just for practice.
Usually it is not the man who proposes to the woman, but she who proposes to him. Only in bourgeois circles is it different. But the bourgeoisie is behind the times.
I don't approve of long engagements. This provides an opportunity to learn the character of the other party, which in my opinion is not recommended.
If we men married the women we are worth, we would have a bad time!
Men marry out of fatigue, women marry out of curiosity. Both are disappointed.
Niagara Falls is the second disappointment of the newlywed.
Marriage has the same destructive effect on a person as cigarettes, but it costs a lot more.
A woman remarries only if her first husband was disgusting to her. And a man marries again only because he loved his first wife very much.
I didn't say he was getting married. I just said that he was going to get married. This is far from the same thing. For example, I clearly remember that I got married, but I don’t remember at all that I was going to get married. And I am inclined to think that I never had such an intention.
Never marry women with straw-colored hair - they are terribly sentimental.
Women seek happiness in marriage, men put theirs at stake.
The strongest foundation for marriage is mutual misunderstanding.
A married man's happiness depends on those he is not married to.
Modern women understand everything except their husbands.
I am a married man, and the beauty of marriage is that both parties inevitably have to become more sophisticated in their lies.
There are too many women in London who believe their husbands. You can immediately recognize them - they look so unhappy.
Twenty years of love makes a woman a wreck; Twenty years of marriage give it the appearance of a public building.
The only thing worse than a marriage without love is a marriage in which love exists only on one side.
You can immediately determine whether a man has a family or not. I have often noticed a very sad look in the eyes of many married men.
Women have become so educated that nothing surprises them anymore - except a happy marriage.
Nowadays, it is dangerous for a husband to show his wife any attention in public. This makes everyone think that he is hitting her in private. People are so suspicious these days of anything that looks like a happy marriage.
Family breaks up much more often because of the husband's sanity than because of anything else. How can a woman be happy with a man who stubbornly wants to see her as a completely rational being?
Polygamy? How much more poetic is it to have one spouse and love many.
She is so indifferent to me, as if I were her husband.
She changed husbands more than once, but kept one lover, and therefore the gossip about her stopped long ago.
When a woman feels that her husband is indifferent to her, she begins to dress too loudly and tastelessly, or she gets very elegant hats, which someone else’s husband pays for.
After burying her third husband, she became blonde out of despair.
Keeping secrets from other people's wives is a necessary luxury in our time. But trying to hide something from your wife is unforgivable frivolity. She'll find out anyway.
The accessibility of divorce has at least the advantage that it introduces a new element of romantic instability into the marriage union. When a couple is married until the end of their lives, how often courtesy becomes pure excess, and gallantry means nothing at all.
Divorces are made in heaven.
Women's conversations
– In my opinion, a husband should not be too charming. Is it dangerous.
“My child, a husband is never too charming!”
– You are not a master at giving compliments. I'm afraid that your wife does not encourage you in this useful habit. This is a big mistake on her part. When a man stops saying nice words, his thoughts change accordingly.
“I hope you are not leading a double life, pretending to be dissolute when you are actually virtuous.” That would be hypocrisy.
- It's good that you smoke. Every man needs something to do. There are too many idle people in London anyway.
– I adore men over seventy. They always offer women love until the grave. In my opinion, seventy years is the ideal age for a man.
– Good husbands are unbearably boring, bad husbands are terribly arrogant.
- All men are monsters. Women have only one thing left to do – feed them better.
“The surest consolation is to win away a suitor from another when you lose your own.” In high society this always rehabilitates a woman.
– To win a man, a woman only needs to awaken the worst that is in him. You make a god out of a man, and he leaves you. The other makes a beast out of him, and he licks her hands and does not leave her side.
“It’s just outrageous how many women in London flirt with their own husbands.” This is very disgusting. It’s like washing clean clothes in public.
– I love eavesdropping through keyholes. You will learn so many interesting things.
“Don’t you think it means to tempt providence?”
“Oh, he’s been tempted so many times already.” It's probably gotten used to it.
– It’s not love at first sight, but love at the end of the season is much more reliable.
– I am unchanged in everything except my feelings.
– This uncertainty is terrible. I wish it wouldn't end longer.
“Margaret has become very prettier.” The last time I saw her, twenty years ago, she was a freak in diapers.
– The former respect for youth is quickly dying out. I lost any influence on my mother at the age of three.
“I believe that if a mother does not part with at least one daughter every season, then she has no heart.”
“This governess is too beautiful to be kept in a decent house.”
– No, I’m not cynical, I just have experience – however, it’s the same thing.
– I like to listen to myself. For me this is one of the greatest pleasures. Sometimes I have very long conversations with myself, and I must admit, I am so educated and smart that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I say.
– I don’t go anywhere without a diary. You should always have something exciting to read on the train.
– Being natural is a very difficult pose – you won’t be able to stand it for long!
“I don’t order orchids, it’s beyond my means, but I don’t spare money on foreigners - they give the living room such a picturesque look!”
“The ideal man should speak to us like goddesses and treat us like children.”
He must refuse us all serious requests and indulge all our whims.
He must always say something different from what he thinks, and think something different from what he says.
He shouldn't neglect other pretty women. This would prove that he has no taste, or would raise the suspicion that he has too much taste.
He must always praise us for qualities that we do not have.
But he must be merciless, completely merciless, condemning us for such virtues that we have never even dreamed of.
He must not believe that we need anything useful. That would be unforgivable. But he must shower us with everything that we do not need at all.
He must constantly compromise us in public and be extremely respectful to us in private.
And the reward for all this will be for him the opportunity to hope endlessly.
– In my opinion, a man is not capable of development. He has already reached the highest point - and God knows how high.
About money
Today's young people imagine that money is everything. And over the years they become convinced of this.
Without being rich, there is absolutely no need to be a nice person. Novels are the privilege of the rich, but in no way the profession of the poor. The poor must be practical and matter-of-fact. It is better to have a constant annual income than to be a charming young man.
In our society, there is only one class that thinks more about money than the rich: the poor. The poor cannot think about anything but money.
A loan is the only capital of the youngest son in the family, and you can live well on this capital.
I don’t need money - it is needed by those who are in the habit of paying debts, and I never pay my creditors.
Those gold-rimmed cigarettes are terribly expensive. I only smoke them when I'm deeply in debt.
Time is a waste of money.
No one is rich enough to buy back their own past.
I knew one young man who was ruined by the addiction of answering all his letters.
About family and relatives
Relatives are the most boring people, they don’t have the slightest idea of how they should live, and they can’t guess when they should die.
I admit, I really can't stand my family. This must be because we cannot stand people with the same shortcomings that we have.
Actually, this is the scourge of God, but they give a person a certain weight.
I assure you that a typewriter, if played with feeling, is no more boring than a piano at which a sister or some other relative sits.
After a good dinner you can forgive anyone, even your own brother.
Genealogist: A person who traces your family tree back as far as you can afford it.
Losing one may still be considered a misfortune, but losing both seems like negligence.
Children start by loving their parents. Then they judge them. And they almost never forgive them.
The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
In America, young people spare no effort in educating their parents, trying to ensure that they, even in their old age, receive the necessary ideas about modern life.
No American child, no matter how much he loves his parents, will ever turn a blind eye to their shortcomings. However, this education system, for all its advantages, does not always work. In many cases, children, no doubt, are dealing with ungrateful material incapable of genuine development; This is evidenced by the fact that the American mother remains a tiresome person.
Fathers should neither be seen nor heard. Only on this basis can a strong family be built.
About life
Life is just a bad quarter of an hour made up of wonderful seconds.
Life is the best theater, but it’s a pity that the repertoire is very bad.
Life is the rarest thing in the world. Most people are only familiar with existence.
Life is too important a thing to talk about seriously.
Life is never fair. For most of us, it's probably better this way.
There is nothing complicated in life. We are the ones who are complex. Life is a simple thing, and what is simpler in it is more correct.
Life gives a person, at best, one single unique moment, and the secret of happiness is to repeat this moment as often as possible.
There is no secret to life. The purpose of life, if there is one, is to always look for temptations. There are very few of them. Sometimes the whole day goes by without seeing anyone.
Man's first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. The second duty of man has not yet been discovered by anyone.
Everyone calls their own mistakes experience.
People always laugh at their tragedies - this is the only way to bear them.
Find words for your sadness and you will love it.
A well-tied tie is the first important step in life.
You should never take sides. This is the beginning of sincerity, followed by seriousness, and all human life turns into sheer boredom.
They lead a simple, healthy village life: getting up early because they have a lot to do, and going to bed early because they have nothing to think about.
In case of major troubles, I deny myself everything except food and drink.
I always surprise myself. This is the only thing worth living for.
The purpose of life is self-expression. The highest duty is duty to oneself.
There are only two tragedies possible in our life. One is when you don’t get what you want, the other is when you do get it. The second is worse, it is truly a tragedy!
– Life is not a game. Life is a mystery. Her ideal is love. Her purification is a sacrifice.
- God forbid you be sacrificed!
Nowadays, most people die from a creeping form of slavish prudence, and everyone realizes too late that the only thing we will never regret is our mistakes and delusions.
Life imitates to a much greater extent than Art imitates Life.
Life is depressingly formless. She sets up her disasters for the wrong people and in the wrong ways. Her comedies are characterized by grotesque horror, and her tragedies are resolved by farce.
The art of living is the only fine art created by our generation.
Most people go bankrupt because they invest too much capital in the prose of life. It is at least an honor to splurge on poetry.
Whoever approaches life as an artist, the brain replaces the soul.
When you look back at life, so vibrant, so full of experiences, filled with moments of such ardent frenzy and joy, it all seems like some kind of dream or dream. What is the unreal if not those passions that once burned like fire? What is incredible if not something you once fervently believed in? What is the impossible? What I once did myself.
A person must absorb the colors of life, but never remember the details. The details are always banal.
The true secret of life lies in the visible, and not in the hidden.
The random illumination of objects in the room, the tone of the morning sky, a smell that you once loved and brought back vague memories, a line of a forgotten poem that you came across again in a book, a musical phrase from a play that you have not played for a long time - these are the little things that determine the course of our lives.
There are no omens. Nature does not send us messengers - she is too wise or too ruthless for this.
About youth and old age
Youth is not fashion. Youth is an art.
How stupid it is to talk about “inexperienced and ignorant youth.” I respectfully listen to the opinions of only those who are much younger than me. ahead of us, life reveals its newest miracles to her.
A necessary condition for perfection is laziness; the goal of perfection is youth.
A disgusting, unhealthy habit of telling the truth, checking everything you hear for truth, and without hesitation objecting to people who are much younger.
I just can't get along with today's youth. No respect for dyed hair.
The secret to staying young is to avoid ugly emotions.
Old people believe everything, mature people doubt everything, young people know everything.
The young man wants to be faithful, but he doesn’t; The old man would like to change, but he cannot.
Youth has a whole kingdom ahead of you. Each of us will be born a king, and many, like kings, die in exile.
The tragedy of old age is not that a person grows old, but that he remains young at heart.
As soon as a person reaches the age when it is necessary to understand, he ceases to understand anything.
To regain youth, you just have to repeat all its follies.
To regain my youth, I am ready to do anything - just not get up early, not do gymnastics and not be a useful member of society.
About education
Education is a wonderful thing, you just need to at least sometimes remember that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
The thirst for knowledge is the fruit of many years of study.
Society produces rogues, and education makes some rogues smarter than others.
The three letters you wrote to me after our breakup are so good and there are so many spelling errors in them that I still can’t help but cry when I re-read them.
A highly educated, knowledgeable person is the modern ideal. And the brain of such a highly educated person is something terrible! It is like an antique shop, filled with all sorts of dusty junk, where each thing is valued much higher than its real value.
A well-educated person contradicts others, a wise person contradicts himself.
All those who were absolutely incapable of learning anything began to teach - this is how our passion for education was crowned.
People teach to hide their ignorance, just as they smile to hide their tears.
Anyone who is so concerned with enlightening others will never take the time to educate himself. The true ideal for man is the growth of his own culture.
God bless you for being next to a man who has spent his whole life striving to educate others. How narrow is the horizon of these people! How tired they are both of us and, probably, of themselves, endlessly repeating and chewing on the same thoughts!
In exams, fools ask questions that wise people cannot answer.
Exams mean absolutely nothing. If you are a gentleman, then you know as much as you need, and if you are not a gentleman, then any knowledge only harms you.
About conversation, education, etiquette
– Do you always understand what you say?
– Yes, if I listen carefully.
I like to talk about nothing. This is the only thing I know anything about.
“You were the only one who spoke the whole time, without closing your mouth.”
“Someone has to listen, but I like to talk myself.” This saves time and prevents disagreements.
In a conversation, you should touch on everything without focusing on anything.
To acquire a reputation as a brilliantly educated person, you need to talk to every woman as if you are in love with her, and to every man as if you are bored with him next to him.
Just don't rush to agree with me. When people agree with me, I always have the feeling that I have messed up somewhere.
Listening is very dangerous: you can be convinced. And a person who yields to the arguments of reason is a very unreasonable creature.
I don't believe a word you tell me... or I tell you.
I usually say what's on my mind. This is a big mistake these days: you are too often misunderstood.
Nowadays, to be understood means to get into trouble.
I live in constant fear that I will be misunderstood.
If you tell the truth, sooner or later you will get caught.
Telling a person the whole truth to his face is sometimes more than a duty - it’s a pleasure.
Giving advice is always a mistake, but good advice will never be forgiven.
To tell is to relive it again. Actions are the first tragedy of life, words are the second. And words are perhaps worse. The words sting.
Scientific conversation is the occupation of the mentally unemployed.
Like all speakers who set themselves the goal of exhausting a topic, he exhausted the patience of his listeners.
I love to listen to how others are slandered, but not about me - the latter does not have the charm of novelty.
At the heart of every gossip is a well-tested immorality.
Backbiting is gossip with a boring connotation of morality.
It’s downright monstrous how people behave these days: behind your back they are telling the absolute truth about you.
I don't want to know what they say about me behind my back. This flatters me too much.
It's always nice not to arrive where you are expected.
Now good upbringing is just a hindrance. It closes many doors in front of you.
Being natural is a pose, and the pose people hate the most!
To be natural, you need to be able to pretend.
Sincerity in small doses is dangerous, but in large doses it is deadly.
Vulgarity is simply the behavior of other people. Others are generally a nightmare audience. The only good company is yourself.
A gentleman is a person who will never offend his neighbor without intent.
I am always very friendly towards those with whom I do not care.
Lunch at half past seven! This early! Yes, it’s like degrading yourself to reading an English novel. No decent person dines before seven.
When a person comes to visit, he wastes his hosts’ time, not his own.
About the society
Being in society is simply boring. And to be outside society is already a tragedy.
People belonging to good society are interesting only for the masks that each of them wears, and not at all for what is hidden behind these masks.
Wonderful ball! That's how I remembered the old time. And there are no fewer fools in society. It's nice to see that everything is the same here.
The world was created by fools so that smart people could live in it.
In a tailcoat and white tie, anyone, even a stockbroker, can pass for a cultured person.
The man who can master the conversation at a London dinner can master the whole world. The future belongs to the dandy.
I love dinner parties in London. Smart people simply do not listen to what they are told, and stupid people do not speak at all.
In Paris such stories make a person famous, but in London people still have so many prejudices. Here you should not start your story with a scandal. Scandals are reserved for old age, when it is necessary to stir up interest in oneself.
There are only five women in all of London worth talking to, and even then two of those five have no place in polite society.
Everything can be survived except death; everything can be transferred except a good reputation.
All good hats are created out of nothing - like all good reputations.
He must be a very respectable man. I had never heard his name in my life, and that means a lot these days.
You should choose your enemies most carefully.
I choose beautiful people as my close friends, people with a good reputation as my friends, and I only make enemies who are smart.
He has no enemies - he is not such an outstanding person.
Everyone sympathizes with the misfortunes of their friends and only a few rejoice at their successes.
Do you know him? I know him so well that I haven't spoken to him in ten years.
I like to know everything about my new acquaintances and nothing about my old ones.
I would never have become his friend if I had known him. It is very dangerous to know your own friends well.
Disputes are an extremely vulgar thing. In a good society, everyone has exactly the same opinion.
Anyone who has had the opportunity to live among the poor will confirm that the brotherhood of man is not an empty fantasy of poets, but the most depressing and vile reality; and if a writer necessarily seeks to understand the morals of high society, he could just as well comprehend them by depicting match-sellers or fruit peddlers.
If the lower classes do not set an example for us, what good are they?
Labor is the curse of the drinking class.
I deeply sympathize with the English democrats who are indignant at the so-called “vices of the upper classes.” People of the lower class instinctively understand that drunkenness, stupidity and immorality should be their privileges, and if any of us suffers from these vices, he thereby usurps their rights.
About politics
I love political salons. This is the only place where they don't talk about politics.
There is hardly a single person in the House of Commons on whom it would be worthwhile for an artist to waste paint. True, many of them need whitewashing.
Nowadays, nothing makes such a favorable impression on listeners as a good, completely worn-out common place. Everyone suddenly feels a kind of kinship of souls.
Members of the House of Commons have nothing to say, which is what they say.
Democracy is nothing more than the intimidation of a crowd by a crowd in the interests of the crowd.
Firm government is the empty hope of those who do not understand how difficult the art of government is.
Anyone who wants to lead the people is forced to follow the crowd.
Progress is the implementation of Utopias.
Making a person a socialist is a trifle, but making socialism humane is a great thing.
The value of an idea has nothing to do with the sincerity of its spokesman.
The most unforgivable thing about a fanatic is his sincerity.
In our age, the world is ruled by individuals, not ideas.
It is impossible to lead people to virtue through legislation - and this is already good.
Society is incomparably more savage from the systematic application of punitive measures than from occasional crimes.
Society often forgives a criminal, but never a dreamer.
The fewer punishments, the fewer crimes.
About England, America... and other countries
America was discovered many times before Columbus, but no one was told about it.
I would say that America is not open at all. It has only just been discovered.
The American is the Don Quixote of common sense, for he is practical to such an extent that he is completely divorced from reality.
There are no stupid Americans in nature. In America there is no room for fools. Even from a bootblack, Americans demand intelligence, and in this they succeed.
America's youth is its oldest tradition. It is already three hundred years old.
They say that in America, pork export is the most profitable business. The only thing more profitable than him is politics.
In America, the president rules for four years, and journalists rule indefinitely.
The cult of heroes in America is extremely developed, and heroes are always chosen among criminals.
In the Southern states there is a strong nostalgia for the times before the Civil War. “What a beautiful moon today!” – I remarked to the gentleman standing next to me. “Yes,” he responded, “but if you had seen her before the war...”
The crude commercial spirit of America, its indifference to the poetic side of life - all this is entirely the result of the fact that the country recognized as its national hero a man who, by his own admission, was incapable of lying.
An American judges beauty by mass; superiority is determined by size.
– Our country is the largest in the world. Some of our states are as large as England and France combined.
“I can imagine how drafty you have there.”
– There is a saying that good Americans go to Paris when they die.
- That's how it is! Where do bad Americans go after death?
- In America.
The American managed to turn his country into a paradise for women. Here, perhaps, lies the reason why American women, like Eve, are so eager to get away from this paradise.
All American women dress well. They order their toilets from Paris.
American women are tired of long races, but they are excellent in steeplechase racing.
Like most American women, she pretends to be a beauty. This is the secret of her success.
All American girls have an exceptional charm, the secret of which is their inability to talk seriously with anyone except their hairdresser, and to think seriously about anything other than entertainment.
The main disadvantage of American girls is their mothers.
Having realized from her mother’s example that American women do not know how to age gracefully, the American girl prefers not to do this at all, and often succeeds here.
We, the British, now really have everything in common with the Americans, except, of course, the language.
England is the homeland of hypocrites.
The British have the magical gift of turning wine into water.
In England, if a person cannot talk about morality at least twice a week to a large and completely immoral audience, the political field is closed to him. In terms of profession, all he has left is botany or the church.
There is something tragic in the fact that in England at present there are such a huge number of young people who start life with excellent profiles and end up in some useful profession.
The ability to think is the most unhealthy thing under the sun, and people die from it just like they die from physical illnesses. Fortunately, here in England this ability is not contagious.
England will not become civilized until the list of its colonies is replenished with Utopia. It would be much more profitable to exchange some of the territories under her control for this country. We need non-practical people who can look beyond what is present and think about what is not limited to today.
In England we have wonderful poetry because the public does not read it, and therefore is not influenced by it.
He had a typically British face. Such a face, once you see it, you will never remember it.
There are twenty-five recipes for cooking potatoes and three hundred and sixty-five recipes for boiling eggs, but the British cook still knows only three ways to serve one or the other.
There is too much fog and serious people in London. Whether the fog creates serious people, or vice versa, I don’t know.
London fogs did not exist until art invented them.
I wouldn't change anything about England except the weather.
The great advantage of France over England is that in France every bourgeois wants to be an artist, whereas in England every artist wants to be a bourgeois.
The Japanese are the creation of certain artists. To be honest, all of Japan is a complete fiction. There is no such country, nor such a people. If you want to experience a specifically Japanese effect, you should not be like a tourist and buy a ticket to Tokyo. On the contrary, you should stay at home, immersing yourself in the study of the work of several Japanese artists, and when you deeply feel their style, understand the peculiarity of their imaginative perception, one afternoon go sit in the park or wander around Piccadilly - if you fail to recognize something purely Japanese there means you will not recognize it anywhere else in the world.
Nothing is impossible in Russia except reforms.
About literature and journalism
In the past, books were written by writers and read by readers. Now books are written by readers and no one reads them.
All the rules about what you should and shouldn't read are simply ridiculous. More than half of modern culture is based on what not to read.
We write so much that we don't have time to think.
Anyone can write a three-volume novel. All that is needed for this is to have absolutely no knowledge of either life or literature.
...Novels that are so similar to life that absolutely no one will believe in the likelihood of what is being told.
The ancient historians present us with delightful fiction in the form of facts; the modern novelist presents us with boring facts under the guise of fiction.
Only great masters of style manage to be unreadable.
Literature cannot adequately express life. But a work of art quite adequately expresses Art, and nothing more is needed. Life is only an ornamental motif.
In fact, it is no easier to artistically describe a prison than, say, a toilet. Taking up the description of the latter in poetry or prose, we can only say whether there is paper there or not, whether it is clean or dirty - and that’s all; The horror of prison lies in the fact that, being in itself extremely primitive and banal, it has such a destructive effect on a person.
Only characters who never existed in reality are truly real; and if a novelist is so helpless that he searches for his heroes in the thick of life, let him at least pretend that he invented them himself, and not boast of their similarity to authentic models.
The nihilist, this amazing martyr without faith, is a purely literary product. It was invented by Turgenev and completed by Dostoevsky.
The nineteenth century as we know it was invented by Balzac. We simply carry out, with notes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy of the creative mind of a great novelist.
About Charles Dickens' novel The Curiosity Shop:
It takes a heart of stone not to laugh when reading about little Nell's death.
If the spirit that permeates the novels of George Sand is antediluvian, it is only because the flood has not yet arrived; if it is utopian, it means that Utopia will have to be added to the geographical realities.
Today's novels are so similar to life that it is impossible to believe in their verisimilitude.
Characters are needed in a novel not in order to see people as they are, but in order to get to know an author who is unlike anyone else.
Hamlet invented pessimism. The whole world has become sad because the stage character once experienced sadness.
About one of the English novelists:
He writes at the top end of his voice. He is so loud that no one can hear him.
How much writers have lost because they started writing. We need them to start talking again.
A parody requires lightness, imagination and, oddly enough, love for the poet being parodied. Only his students can parody him - and no one else.
I know how fun it can be to pick up a nickname and wear it like a rose in your buttonhole. This is how all major schools in art acquired their names.
All bad poetry is born of sincere feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be unartistic.
There seems to be some strange connection between piety and bad rhymes.
Poets know very well that it is profitable to write about love; it is in great demand. A broken heart goes through many editions these days.
Love went out of fashion, it was killed by poets. They wrote so much about her that everyone stopped believing them.
If a person has published a collection of bad sonnets, you can say in advance that he is completely irresistible. He brings into his life the poetry that he is unable to bring into his poems. But poets of a different kind pour out poetry on paper that they do not have the courage to bring into life.
Sometimes it seems to me that Homer’s blindness is actually an artistic myth, created in times of true criticism in order to remind us not only that a great poet is always a seer, comprehending the world not with physical, but with spiritual vision, but also that he is a real singer, whose song is born from music, when, repeating each line to himself again and again, he grasps the secret of its melody and in the darkness finds words surrounded by light.
Charles Lamb says that the merits of poetry are always doubtful to him until they are published; according to his remarkable judgment, “the printer takes care of all questions.”
A poet can tolerate anything except a typo.
There are no natural-born liars and poets.
The foundation of literary friendship is the exchange of poisoned glasses.
What is the difference between journalism and literature? Journalism is not worth reading, and literature is not worth reading.
In our age, newspapers are trying to force the public to judge a sculptor not by his sculptures, but by how he treats his wife; about an artist - by the size of his income, and about a poet - by the color of his tie.
Journalism is organized slander.
Today's journalists always face to face and ask a person for forgiveness for what they said about him publicly.
– Do you really believe everything that they write in the newspapers?
- I believe. Nowadays only things happen that are impossible to believe.
– I read all English newspapers. They are very interesting.
- Well, then you are reading between the lines.
In its justification, journalism can refer to the great Darwinian law of survival of the ordinary.
There is much to be said in defense of modern journalism. By giving a voice to the uneducated, she introduces us to public ignorance.
Spies are a dying profession. Now the newspapers do everything for them.
About theater, music and painting
I love the stage, everything is much truer on it than in life.
Sometimes the least pleasure you get in the theater is from a play. More than once I saw an audience that was more interesting than the actors, and heard dialogue in the foyer that was superior to what I heard from the stage.
The audience looks at the tragedian, but the comedian looks at the audience.
The true playwright shows us life through the means of art, and not art in the form of life.
If a play is a work of art, its production in a theater is a test not for the play, but for the theater; if it is not a work of art, its production in the theater is a test not for the play, but for the audience.
Sometimes they say that actors show us their Hamlets instead of Shakespeare's. But in reality there is no Shakespearean Hamlet. If there is certainty in Hamlet, as in a work of art, there is also confusion in it, as in any phenomenon of life. There are as many Hamlets as there are types of melancholy.
Unless an actor feels at home in a suit, he does not feel at home in his role.
Tragic effects can be achieved by introducing the comic. Laughter in the audience does not eliminate the feeling of horror, but, by providing an outlet, it helps it deepen. Never be afraid to make the room laugh. This will not spoil, but, on the contrary, will intensify the tragedy.
Any extremely intense emotion tends to be discharged with the help of some emotion of the opposite nature. Hysterical laughter and tears of joy are examples of the dramatic effect that nature itself provides.
If an ancient Greek were resurrected today, he would be more often found in the circus than in the theater.
Music is that type of art in which form and content are one.
What a blessing that we have at least one inimitable art!
If we want to understand a people based on the art they create, then it is better to turn to architecture or music. The spirit of an era is best conveyed by abstract arts, since the spirit itself is an abstract and ideal concept.
Of course, there are many difficulties with music. If the music is good, no one listens to it, and if it’s bad, it’s impossible to have a conversation.
I prefer Wagner's music to any other. It's so noisy, you can chat to it in the theater all evening without fear of being heard by strangers.
The music will be in German, you won't understand.
Musicians are such unreasonable people. They want us to be dumb, just when we most want to be deaf.
After Chopin, I feel as if I had just cried over mistakes and sins of which I was innocent, and tragedies that had nothing to do with me.
The actor is the critic of the drama. A music critic is a singer, or a violinist, or a flautist.
I really idolize pianists. I don’t know what attracts me so much about them... Maybe it’s the fact that they are foreigners. After all, they seem to be all foreigners? Even those born in England eventually become foreigners. This is very smart of them and gives their art a good reputation and makes it cosmopolitan.
In America, in the Rocky Mountains, I saw the only reasonable method of artistic criticism. There was a sign above the piano in the bar:
"Don't shoot the pianist - he's doing everything he can."
The picture brings us no more message or meaning than a marvelous piece of Venetian glass or a blue tile from the wall of Damascus: it is only a beautifully painted surface.
Art should not be taught at the Academy. An artist is created by what he sees, not what he hears.
...Academic artists, whose complete inability to paint we can see every year in May for a shilling.
...That curious mixture of bad work and good intentions which gives us the right to consider an artist a typical representative of English art.
Most of our modern portrait painters are destined for complete oblivion. They never convey what they see. They convey what the public sees, but the public sees absolutely nothing.
You can only trust those portraits in which the model is almost invisible, but the artist is very clearly visible.
Every portrait painted with love is, in essence, a portrait of the artist himself, and not of the one who posed for him. The artist reveals not him, but himself on the canvas.
Neither Gothic nor antiquity know poses at all. The pose was invented by mediocre portrait painters, and the first person to start posing was a stockbroker, who has been posing ever since.
The only people with whom an artist should make acquaintance are beautiful and stupid people, people whom it is an artistic pleasure to look at, and with whom talking is a rest for the mind.
About art
Only art has a soul, but man does not.
Art is the only serious thing in the world, but the artist is the only person in the world who is never serious.
Art expresses nothing but itself.
You can forgive a person who does something useful, as long as he does not admire it. For those who create something useless, the only justification is passionate love for their creation.
All art is completely useless.
Art was more of a blanket than a mirror.
Art creates great archetypes, in relation to which everything that exists is only an unfinished copy.
If nature is matter striving to become a soul, then art is the soul expressing itself in the material.
Art is our spiritual protest, our gallant attempt to show nature its true place.
A thing that exists in nature becomes much more beautiful if it resembles an object of art, but an object of art does not become truly beautiful by resembling a thing that exists in nature.
The concept of “art for art’s sake” does not imply an ultimate goal, but only a formula for creativity.
Art is created for life, not life for art.
Life is the best, the only student of art.
Life moves faster than Realism, but Romanticism always remains ahead of Life.
In fact, art reflects not life, but the viewer.
It would be a mistake to think that the passion experienced during creativity can find full expression in the created work. Art is much more abstract than we think. Form and colors tell us about form and colors, and nothing more.
Art moves forward exclusively along the route it has laid out for itself. It is not an expression of any age. On the contrary, the age itself is an expression of art.
Only the modern is destined to become old-fashioned.
Art does not influence human activity - on the contrary, it paralyzes the desire to act.
In art, as in politics, grandfathers are always wrong.
Of all the artists I knew, only the mediocre ones were charming people. The talented live by their creativity and therefore are not at all interesting in themselves. A great poet - a truly great one - always turns out to be the most prosaic person. And the secondary ones are fascinating.
People of art have gender, but art itself has no gender.
I have always believed and still believe that egoism is the alpha and omega of modern art, but to be an egoist, you must have an ego. Not everyone who shouts loudly: “Me! I!”, is allowed to enter the Kingdom of Art.
Art without individuality is impossible. Although at the same time its purpose is not to express individuality. It exists to provide pleasure.
Everyone should be a piece of art—or wear a work of art.
The best school for studying art is art itself, not life.
The world is created by singers, and they are created for dreamers.
The artist does not seek to prove anything. You can prove anything, even undoubted truths.
Artists, like gods, should never leave their pedestals.
The purpose of art is to reveal beauty and hide the artist.
What is not in the creator cannot be in the creation.
The more art imitates an era, the less it conveys its spirit.
No great artist sees things as they really are.
Technique is actually the personality of the artist. That is why the master is not able to teach it, and the apprentice is not able to adopt it, but the artist critic can understand it.
These artists are truly eccentric! They bend over backwards to achieve fame, and when fame comes, they seem to be burdened by it. How stupid this is! If it’s unpleasant when they talk about you a lot, then it’s even worse when they don’t talk about you at all.
We look at distant centuries through art, and art, fortunately, never conveys the truth.
The object of Art should not be simple reality, but complex beauty.
Only the gods tasted death. Apollo died, but Hyacinth, whom people believed he killed, is still alive. Nero and Narcissus are always with us.
They try to appeal to the authority of Shakespeare - they always appeal to him - and they will quote that poorly written passage where it is said about the mirror that art holds up to nature, forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism was put, not without reason, in the mouth of Hamlet, so that those around him would have another opportunity to be convinced of his complete madness when it comes to art.
The main purpose of nature, apparently, is to illustrate the lines of poets.
Art creates its incomparable single effect, and having achieved it, it moves on to another. And nature keeps repeating and repeating this effect until everyone is completely tired of it. Nowadays, let’s say, no one endowed with even the rudiments of culture will talk about the beauty of sunsets. Sunsets have become quite old-fashioned. They were good at a time when Turner was the last word in painting. Last night Mrs. Arendelle persistently invited me to look out the window at the dazzling beauty of the sky, as she put it. And what did I see? Just a second-rate Turner, and besides, all his worst flaws were highlighted and emphasized beyond all measure.
As art becomes more varied, nature will no doubt also become less annoyingly homogeneous.
Nature imitates art. It can demonstrate only those effects that are already familiar to us through poetry or painting. This is the secret of nature's charm, as well as the secret of its flaws.
A well-chosen boutonniere is the only link between Art and Nature.
Art should never be made available to the public. The public should strive to cultivate artistry in itself.
The public is surprisingly tolerant. She will forgive you everything except genius.
The public is filled with an insatiable curiosity for anything but what is worthy of attention.
Looking at something is not the same as seeing it. You don't see anything until you learn to see beauty.
Beauty has as many meanings as a person has moods. Beauty is a symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything to us because it expresses nothing.
Everything beautiful belongs to the same era.
The only thing that is beautiful is that which has nothing to do with us. Hecuba is nothing to us, and that is precisely why her sorrows constitute such grateful material for tragedy.
I would like to remind those who scoff at beauty as something impractical that an ugly thing is simply a poorly made thing. In beauty there is divine economy, it gives us only what we need; ugliness is wasteful, it wastes material; ugliness, both in costume and in everything else, is always a sign that someone has been impractical.
Beauty is the highest revelation because it does not express anything.
The ethics of art is the perfect use of imperfect means.
There was no creative era that did not also become an era of criticism. For it is nothing other than the critical faculty that creates fresh forms.
I would call criticism creativity within creativity.
For true interpretation one's own personality is absolutely necessary.
A true critic does not address the artist, but only the public. He works for her.
The critic is called upon to enlighten the reader; the artist is called upon to enlighten the critic.
The critic's goal is to capture his own impressions. It is for him that paintings are created, books are written and marble is turned into sculpture.
Criticism requires much more culture than creativity.
Only for the reason that a person himself cannot create anything can he become a worthy judge of what another has created.
I do not agree with everything I have stated in this essay. I strongly disagree with many things. An essay simply develops a certain artistic point of view, and in art criticism, position is everything. Because there is no universal truth in art. Truth in art is Truth, the opposite of which is also true.
How much does a theme mean to an artist as creative as a critic? No less, but no more, than it means to a novelist or a painter. He is similar to them in that he knows how to find his motives everywhere.
Creativity always trails behind its age. And this age is directed by Criticism. The Spirit of Criticism and the Universal Spirit are one.
Creativity narrows the limits of vision, while contemplation expands them.
Only the auction host is capable of equally and impartially admiring all schools of art.
There are two ways to dislike art. One of them is to simply not love him. The other is to love him rationally.
Poor reviewers find themselves in the position of reporters at a police station located in the camp of literature, and are forced to inform about new crimes of recidivists from art.
In books of public series it is customary to present public views, and cheap criticism is excusable in cheap editions.
Judging by their appearance, most of the critics are sold at an inexpensive price.
Caricature is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius.
The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In the novel they are disgusting.
Perhaps a more accurate description of what never happened is the inherent privilege and specialty of the historian.
Centuries live in history thanks to their anachronisms.
About Herodotus, the “father of history”:
Herodotus, despite the petty and base encroachments of modern pedants seeking confirmation of the facts set forth in his history, can rightly be called the Father of Lies.
Carlyle's The French Revolution is one of the most charming historical novels ever written.
All you're doing is turning history on its head.
This is our only duty to history.
In no case does art reproduce its age. The great mistake of all historians is that they judge the era itself by the art of the era.
Even the most noble men are extremely susceptible to female charms. Modern history, like ancient history, provides many deplorable examples of this. If it were otherwise, history would be impossible to read.
All great personalities are sooner or later doomed to be at the level of their biographers.
Everyone can create history, but only great people can write it.
Today every great man has disciples, and his biography is usually written by Judas.
Modern memoirs are usually written by people who have completely lost their memory and have not done anything worthy of being written down.
If cavemen had been able to do this, history would have taken a different path.
About truth
The road to truth is paved with paradoxes. To comprehend Reality, one must see how it balances on a tightrope.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Truth is completely and absolutely created by style.
Language is not the son, but the father of thought.
Truth never depends on facts, selecting and creating them at its own discretion.
I can still come to terms with brute force, but brute, dull rationality is completely unbearable. To be guided by reason - there is something ignoble in this. This means betraying the intellect.
-Are you absolutely sure about this?
- I'm absolutely sure.
– Well, in that case it’s just an illusion. The very thing you firmly believe in does not actually exist. This is the fatal fate of faith, and this is what love teaches us.
How easy it is to convert others and how difficult it is to convert yourself.
The truth ceases to be the truth as soon as more than one person believes in it.
Faith does not become truth just because someone dies for it.
Every thought is immoral. Its essence is destruction. Nothing can withstand the influence of thought.
We express a truly impartial opinion only about what is of no interest to us, and that is why an impartial opinion, in turn, is of absolutely no value.
A thought that cannot be called dangerous does not deserve to be called a thought at all.
A person is least likely to be himself when talking about his own person. Let him put on the mask and you will hear the truth from him.
Only the most undiscerning people do not judge by appearance.
A lie is the truth of other people.
A person can believe in the impossible, but he will never believe in the improbable.
About religion and morality
Religion is a common surrogate for faith.
Religions die when the truth contained in them is proven. Science is the chronicle of dead religions.
Skepticism is the beginning of faith.
What is Truth? When it comes to religion, this is nothing more than a well-known opinion that has managed to last for centuries.
Holiness is created by love. Saints are people who loved the most.
Christ died not to save people, but to teach them to save each other.
The past, present and future are just one moment in the eyes of God, and we should try to live before his eyes.
The paths of the gods are paved only by those whose judgments sound like the voice of a pilgrim in the desert.
The prayer must remain unanswered, otherwise it is no longer prayer, but correspondence.
Miracles! I do not believe in miracles. I've seen too many miracles.
Herodias in Wilde's drama Salome.
Truths of faith are believed not because they are reasonable, but because they are often repeated.
The Lord, when creating man, somewhat overestimated his strength.
The only apostle who did not deserve to be presented with proof of the existence of God was St. Thomas, but he alone received it.
Atheism needs religion no less than faith.
The bishop, at eighty, continues to repeat what was instilled in him when he was an eighteen-year-old youth - naturally, his face retains beauty and good looks.
Both the theory and practice of the church in the early centuries of Christianity spoke out against marriage. Therefore, the church of the first centuries of Christianity did not survive to our time.
As soon as the cannibals begin to threaten death from exhaustion, God, in his infinite mercy, sends them a fat missionary.
Mercy gives rise to many sins.
Better a hundred unnatural sins than one unnatural virtue.
It's better to be beautiful than to be virtuous. But, on the other hand, it is better to be virtuous than ugly.
An orchid as beautiful as the seven deadly sins.
The tragedy of the poor is that only self-denial is within their means. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.
Boredom is the only sin for which there is no forgiveness.
Nothing flatters our pride more than the reputation of a sinner.
Not a sinner, but a fool - this is the greatest of our evils. There is no sin except stupidity.
Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.
Depravity is a myth invented by virtuous people to explain the strange attractiveness of some people.
In the village, anyone can be righteous. There are no temptations there. Joining civilization is not an easy task. There are two ways for this: culture or so-called debauchery. But both are inaccessible to villagers. So they have become rigid in virtue.
Aesthetics are higher than ethics. It belongs to the realm of higher spirituality. In the development of personality, even the sense of color acquired by it is more important than the acquired understanding of good and evil.
There are no moral or immoral books. There are books that are well written and books that are poorly written. That's all.
Morality has always been the last refuge of people indifferent to art.
A man who reads morals is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who reads morals is certainly an ugly woman.
The easiest way to feign innocence is by immodest behavior.
Hypocrisy is a very interesting subject for psychologists, and although of all types of posturing the moral one is the most disgusting, the ability to strike a pose is already worth something.
We attribute to our neighbors those virtues from which we can benefit ourselves, and we imagine that we do this out of generosity.
There is nothing more distressing than discovering virtue in a person whom you would never suspect of it. It's like stumbling upon a needle in a haystack. It stings. If you have a virtue, you should warn about it in advance.
It seems to me that good people do a lot of harm in life... And the main harm is that they attach such great importance to the bad. It makes no sense to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or boring. I prefer the charming ones.
I did not turn out to be a spoiled person. Many even claim that I have never committed a single truly bad offense in my entire life. Of course, they only say this behind my back.
My bad qualities are simply monstrous. When I remember them at night, I immediately fall asleep again.
Do you really think that only weak people give in to temptation? I assure you, there are such terrible temptations that it takes strength, strength and courage to succumb to them.
The only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it.
I can resist everything except temptation.
Even the worst habits can be difficult to break. Perhaps the most difficult thing is with the bad ones. They are such an essential part of our self.
Intellectual abstractions are always interesting, but moral abstractions mean absolutely nothing.
“Conscience” is the official name for cowardice, that’s all.
Conscience makes us all selfish.
Selfishness does not mean that a person lives as he wants, but that he forces others to live according to his principles.
Thinking about yourself is not selfishness. Anyone who does not think about himself is not able to think at all. But it is extremely selfish to demand from your neighbor thoughts and judgments similar to your own. For what? If he is able to think, most likely he thinks differently. If he is not capable, it is unacceptable to demand a glimpse of thought from him.
The main harm of marriage is that it eradicates selfishness from a person. And unselfish people are colorless, they lose their individuality.
Those who pretend to be good are taken seriously by the world. Those who pretend to be bad are not. Such is the boundless stupidity of optimists.
A person always commits the most ridiculous actions out of the noblest motives.
Loving everyone means loving no one.
Self-sacrifice is a remnant of the savage ritual of self-mutilation, a reminder of that worship of pain, which in history has brought so much evil and even now demands new victims every day, erecting its altars.
Self-sacrifice should be prohibited by law. It corrupts those to whom the sacrifice is made. They always go astray.
Forgiving your enemies is the best way to piss them off.
A sense of duty is exactly what we want to see in others.
My duty is something I don't do out of principle.
Good intentions are checks that people write to a bank where they do not have a checking account.
Generosity is not contagious.
Philosophy teaches us to endure the misfortunes of other people.
Philanthropists, carried away by charity, lose all philanthropy.
It is much easier to have sympathy for the disadvantaged. It is much more difficult to sympathize with a thought.
Don't talk to me about the suffering of the poor. They are inevitable. Talk about the suffering of geniuses, and I will cry tears of blood.
There is something highly unhealthy in universal sympathy for suffering. You need to sympathize with the beauty, bright colors and joys of life. The nineteenth century went bankrupt because it was too lavish on compassion.
To be a good person means to be at peace with yourself. Discord is the need to be in agreement with others.
Every influence is harmful, but a beneficial influence is worse than anything in the world.
Every crime is vulgar, just as every vulgarity is a crime.
Murder is always a mistake. You should never do anything that you can't chat with people about after dinner.
Any trial is a trial over someone's life, and any sentence is a death sentence.
You can endure any adversity - they come from outside, they are random. But suffering for your own mistakes is the most bitter thing that can happen in life.
What is a cynic? A person who has a price for everything, but does not know the value.
There is only one thing worse than Injustice - Justice, from whose hands the sword was taken. When Truth is not also Strength, it is Evil.
As long as war is seen as evil, it will always have a certain appeal. When they learn to see vulgarity in her, she will not attract anyone.
About people and man
The only thing we know for certain about human Nature is that it changes. Variability is its only predictable property.
It’s humiliating to realize that we are all cut from the same cloth, but where can we get away from this? There is something of Hamlet in Falstaff, and much of Falstaff in Hamlet.
The whole world is a theater, but the troupe is no good.
Humanity exaggerates its role on earth. This is his original sin.
The chosen ones exist to do nothing. Action is both limited and relative. Boundless and absolute are the visions of one who is inactive and observant, who is dreamy and lonely.
When acting, a person becomes like a puppet. By describing, he becomes a poet.
Only people of action have more illusions than dreamers. They have no idea why they are doing something, or what will come of it.
Dissatisfaction is the first step towards progress, both for the individual and for the people.
We are all wallowing in the mud, but some of us are looking at the stars.
In this age people read too much to be wise and think too much to be beautiful.
The greatest events in the world are those that take place in the human brain.
True excellence lies not in what a person has, but in what he is.
A true personality should not be consonant with rebellion, it should be consonant with peace.
When a person is happy, he is always good. But good people are not always happy.
We are all ready to believe in others for the simple reason that we are afraid for ourselves. Optimism is based on pure fear.
All charming people are flawed. This is the secret of their attractiveness.
People interest me more than their principles, and most interesting of all are people without principles.
Cheap editions of great books are always welcome, but cheap versions of great men are despicable.
Only two kinds of people are truly interesting - those who know absolutely everything about life, and those who know nothing about it.
Most people are keenly interested in everything in the world, except for what is really worth knowing.
People have become so hardworking that they have become immensely stupid.
It is precisely those passions, the nature of which we misunderstand, that dominate us most powerfully. And the weakest of all are feelings whose origin is clear to us.
The mirrors reflect only the masks.
The mask tells us more than the face.
People's feelings are much more interesting than their thoughts.
Anyone who sees any difference between soul and body has neither one nor the other.
Imagination is given to a person to console him with what he does not have, and a sense of humor - to console him with what he does have.
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Moderation is a fatal quality. Only extremes lead to success.
Ambition is the last refuge of a loser.
Seriousness is the last refuge of mediocrity.
I love simple pleasures. This is the last refuge of complex natures.
A sensitive person is one who will certainly press on others’ calluses if he himself suffers from them.
A pessimist, faced with a choice between two types of evil, chooses both.
Other people's dramas are always unbearably banal.
None of us would tolerate mistakes like ours from others.
“There is one thing about you that I always like.”
- Only one? And I have so many shortcomings.
He is one of those extremely weak-willed people who cannot be influenced by anyone.
He died. Apparently, he attached too much importance to his doctors' diagnosis.
If you want to understand others, look more closely at yourself.
To even partially understand yourself, you need to understand everything about others.
I am the only person in the world whom I would like to get to know better.
Only shallow people know themselves.
I don't believe in progress, but I do believe in the permanence of human stupidity.
About miscellaneous
In the temple, everyone must be serious except the one being worshiped.
In all trivial matters, it is style, not sincerity, that matters. In all serious matters, too.
You should always play honestly if you have all the trump cards in your hands.
Actions are the last refuge of people who cannot dream.
There are only two phenomena that even in our nineteenth century still remain inexplicable and unjustified: death and vulgarity.
Everyone should go to a palmist at least once a month to know what they can and cannot do. Then, of course, we do everything the other way around, but how nice it is to know about the consequences in advance!
Fashion is such an intolerable form of ugliness that it has to be changed every six months.
Fashionable is what you wear, unfashionable is what others wear.
You can admire someone else's language even if you can't speak it fluently, just as you can love a woman without knowing her at all.
We live in an era when only useless things are needed.
I hate it when people don't take food seriously. These are unfounded people, and vulgar ones at that.
There are no tactless questions, only tactless answers.
There is nothing more dangerous than being fashionable. Everything fashionable quickly goes out of fashion.
No mistake costs us as little as prophecy.
Doing nothing is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most spiritual.
I have the best opinion about football. A great game for rough girls, but not for delicate boys.
To define means to limit.
Cigarettes are the most perfect form of supreme pleasure, subtle and spicy, but leaving us unsatisfied. What more could you want?
Nature is by no means the mother who nurtured us. She is our creation.
Nature hates reason.
Punctuality is the thief of time.
Work is the last refuge of those who can’t do anything else.
It is worth doing only what is considered impossible.
Anyone who looks at a matter from both sides usually sees neither of them.
It's hard to escape the future.
It's none of my business. That's why it interests me. My work always makes me sad. I prefer strangers.
It's terribly hard work to do nothing.
This is what I always do with good advice: I pass it on to others. There is nothing more to do with them.
I don't like principles. I prefer prejudice.
I hate fights, no matter the reason. They are always vulgar and often demonstrative.
From Wilde's letter to Ada Leverson:
I read to Alfred passages from his own life. It was a surprise for him. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I hope you will guide mine.
Oscar Wilde about others
About Shakespeare:
City life nurtures and improves everything that is most civilized in man. Shakespeare, until he came to London, wrote nothing but bad pamphlets, and did not write a single line when he left London forever.
The more objective a work seems to us, the more subjective it actually is. Perhaps Shakespeare really met Rosencrantz and Gildenstern on the London streets or saw servants from warring families quarreling in the square, but Hamlet came from his soul and Romeo was born of his passion.
About Honore de Balzac:
Read Balzac well, and our living friends will turn out to be just shadows, our acquaintances - shadows of shadows. One of the greatest dramas of my life is the death of Lucien du Rubempre.
Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, not reproduced it.
About Emile Zola:
Zola carefully creates a panorama of the Second Empire. But who is interested in the Second Empire now? It's already outdated.
About Charles Dickens:
There is so little common sense in Dickens's art that he is not even capable of satire; his true element is caricature.
About Robert Louis Stevenson:
A romantic environment is the worst environment for a romantic writer. On Gower Street, Stevenson could create a new Three Musketeers. And in Samoa he writes letters to Time about the Germans.
I also see that he goes out of his way to pursue a natural life. If you are cutting down a forest, then in order to do it effectively, you should not be able to describe this process. Natural life is essentially unconscious life. By picking up a shovel, Stevenson merely expanded the field of the artificial.
If I spend the rest of my life in a Parisian café reading Baudelaire, it will be more natural than if I get a job trimming hedges or planting cocoa in knee-deep mud.
About the American writer Henry James:
He writes prose as if composing was a severe punishment for him.
About Irish writer George Moore:
He wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.
About novelist George Meredith:
As a storyteller he knows everything in the world except language, as a novelist he knows absolutely everything except the ability to tell a story, and as an artist he also masters everything except the gift of expressing himself clearly.
About the poet Robert Browning:
After Shakespeare there was no Shakespearean personality. Shakespeare could sing in a million voices, Browning could stutter in a thousand ways.
Meredith is Browning in prose, and so is Browning.
About one of his contemporaries:
If he had known less, he might have become a poet.
About the English critic Max Beerbohm:
The gods gave Max the gift of eternal old age.
About Bernard Shaw:
Wonderful person. He has no enemies and is not loved by any of his friends.
You can have different ways of not liking his plays or loving his novels.
About writer and publisher Frank Norris:
Frank Norris was invited to every decent English home - once.
About James Whistler:
James Whistler is one of the greatest masters of painting; This is my opinion. And I must add that Mr. Whistler fully shares this opinion.
Whistler, for all his shortcomings, did not sin with a single line of poetry.
About Audrey Beardsley, illustrator of Wilde's Salome:
Audrey Beardsley was invented by me.
Probably no one is the author of more quotes than the English writer Oscar Wilde. Quotes This writer touches on all aspects of life: there is about life, about friendship, about love, about work, about society. Many of Oscar Wilde's works are simply disassembled into quotes.
We present to your attention best Oscar Wilde quotes in English. For all quotes there is translating to Russian language. The quotes are so different that I think everyone will find lines among this set that are close only to them. For example, I liked these ones.
Quotes by Oscar Wilde
Time is a waste of money.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
And here it is translation of these Oscar Wilde quotes into Russian. If you do not know English, then the order of quotes in English coincides with the order of the same quotes in Russian!
- Time is a waste of money.
- We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
- Always forgive your enemies, nothing irritates them more.
- In the beginning, children love their parents; then, when they get older, they begin to judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
- Fashion is a form of ugliness and is so intolerable that we have to change it every six months.
Oscar Wilde. Quotes in English with translation
Oscar Wilde. Quotes about life (in English)
Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.
I beg your pardon I didn’t recognize you — I’ve changed a lot.
There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
Oscar Wilde. Quotes about life (translation into Russian)
- Life is a nightmare that prevents us from sleeping.
- I apologize for not recognizing you - I have changed a lot.
- Our life contains only two tragedies. The first is that you cannot satisfy all your desires, the second is when they are all already satisfied.
- Being natural is the most difficult pose to maintain.
- Be yourself - all other roles are already taken.
Oscar Wilde. Quotes about society (in English)
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genuis.
Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.
Oscar Wilde. Quotes about society (translation into Russian)
- America was discovered more than once before Columbus, but as always it was hushed up.
- Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
- No matter what they say about you, the only thing worse than this is when they don’t talk about you.
- Society is surprisingly tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. (my translation)
- Questions are never indiscreet. Unlike the answers.
Oscar Wilde. Quotes about friendship (in English)
Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.
I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.
Oscar Wilde. Quotes about friendship (translation into Russian)
- Everyone sympathizes with the misfortunes of their friends, and only a few rejoice at their successes.
- I don't want to go to heaven, my friends aren't there (my translation)
Oscar Wilde. Quotes about people (in English)
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else`s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Some things are more precious because they don’t last long.
It is so easy to convince others; it is so difficult to convince oneself.
Oscar Wilde. Quotes about people (translation into Russian)
- If you want to tell people the truth, then make them laugh, otherwise they will kill you.
- A person is most disingenuous when he speaks on his own behalf. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.
- Most of us are not us. Our thoughts are other people's judgments; our life is an imitation of someone, our passions are a copying of other people’s passions.
- I am always very friendly towards those with whom I do not care.
- Being selfish does not mean living the way you want. This means asking others to live the way you would like.
- Some things are valuable only because they don't last. (my translation)
- It is easy to convince others, but it is much more difficult to convince yourself.
Oscar Wilde. Quotes about work (in English)
It is awfully hard work doing nothing.
Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.
Oscar Wilde. About work (translation into Russian)
- It's terribly hard work to do nothing.
- Work is the refuge of those who can’t do anything else. (or a more accurate translation Work is the salvation of those who have nothing else to do.)
Oscar Wilde. Quotes about myself (in English)
I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means.
I can resist anything but temptation.
I am not young enough to know everything.
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
I have nothing to declare except my genius.
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do — the day after.
I like talking to a brick wall- it’s the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
Oscar Wilde. About myself (translation into Russian)
- I suppose I will have to die beyond my means. (my translation)
- I can resist everything except temptation.
- I'm not young enough to know everything. (my translation)
- Whenever people agree with me, I feel like I'm wrong.
- I have nothing to declare except my genius. (words by O. Wilde at customs)
- I am not picky: the best is enough for me.
- Self-love is the beginning of a romance that lasts a lifetime.
- I never put off until tomorrow what I can do the day after tomorrow.
- I love talking to a brick wall - it’s the only person I’m talking to who doesn’t argue with me. (my translation)
- I love simple pleasures. This is the last refuge of complex natures.
Oscar Wilde. Quotes about love (in English)
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.
Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What women like to be a man’s last romance.
Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed. (From "The Picture of Dorian Gray")
One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry
The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart-hearts are made to be broken-but that it turns one’s heart to stone.
We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes..
I am happy in my prison of passion.
Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.
Oscar Wilde. About love (translation into Russian)
- Women love us for our flaws. If there are a fair amount of these shortcomings, they are ready to forgive us everything, even our intelligence.
- Women are created to be loved, not to be understood.
- A man always wants to be a woman's first love. Women are more sensitive in such matters. They would like to become a man's last love.
- Men marry out of fatigue, women marry out of curiosity. Both are disappointed.
- You must always be in love. This is why you should never get married.
- The worst thing happens not when the heart is broken - hearts are made for this - but when the heart turns to stone. (my translation)
- A woman loves with her ears, and a man with his eyes.
- I am happy in the prison of my passions.
- At first the woman resists the man. However, it ends with her not wanting him to leave.
Oscar Wilde. Quotes about wine (in English)
I drink to separate my body from my soul.
Oscar Wilde. About wine (translation into Russian)
- I drink to separate my body from my soul.
