Form is absolutely
essential
to it.
Oscar Wilde - Aphorisms, the Soul of Man
Women are a fascinatingly wilful sex. Every woman is a rebel, and
usually in wild revolt against herself.
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
No man came across two ideal things. Few come across one.
To become the spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of
life.
The state is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is
beautiful.
A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of
punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human
nature and not on its growth and development.
Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is
an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under
socialism and individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in
communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.
All art is immoral.
He to whom the present is the only thing that is present knows nothing
of the age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century one must
realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to
its making.
Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them.
The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.
The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the
world has ever known; the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the
only tyranny that lasts.
The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married.
There is no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are
imperfect men. And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and
yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain
free at all.
A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence or a
scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions.
All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.
The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it.
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them they will
forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
Society is a necessary thing. No man has any real success in this world
unless he has got women to back him--and women rule society. If you have
not got women on your side you are quite over. You might just as well be
a barrister or a stockbroker or a journalist at once.
The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been
decried; men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and
sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are
conscious of sharing with the less highly organised forms of existence.
But it is probable the true nature of the senses has never been
understood, and that they have remained savage and animal merely because
the world has sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by
pain instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of
which a fine instinct for beauty will be the dominant characteristic.
Women appreciate cruelty more than anything else. They have wonderfully
primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves,
looking for their master all the same. They love being dominated.
Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It
is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the way of the
gods must be prepared.
Circumstances are the lashes laid on to us by life. Some of us have to
receive them with bared ivory backs, and others are permitted to keep on
a coat--that is the only difference.
Criticism is itself an art. . . . It is no more to be judged by any low
standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or
sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that
he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour
or the unseen world of passion and thought. He does not even require for
the perfection of his art the finest materials. Anything will serve his
purpose.
It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In
the sphere of actual life that is, of course, obvious. Anybody can make
history, only a great man can write it.
If we lived long enough to see the results of our actions it may be that
those who call themselves good would be filled with a wild remorse and
those whom the world calls evil stirred with a noble joy. Each little
thing that we do passes into the great machine of life, which may grind
our virtues to powder and make them worthless or transform our sins into
elements of a new civilisation more marvellous and more splendid than
any that has gone before.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge
them, sometimes they forgive them.
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise and that thinks too
much to be beautiful.
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its
details. Details are always vulgar.
It will be a marvellous thing--the true personality of man--when we see
it. It will grow naturally and simply flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It
will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not
prove things. It will know everything, and yet it will not busy itself
about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by
material things. It will have nothing, and yet it will have everything,
and whatever one takes from it it will still have, so rich it will be.
It will not be always meddling with others or asking them to be like
itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet, while
it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing
helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very
wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
Cynicism is merely the art of seeing things as they are instead of as
they ought to be.
Three addresses always inspire confidence, even in tradesmen.
If one doesn't talk about a thing it has never happened. It is simply
expression that gives reality to things.
No man is able who is unable to get on, just as no woman is clever who
can't succeed in obtaining that worst and most necessary of evils, a
husband.
The one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know
when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon
as the interest of the play is entirely over they propose to continue
it. If they were allowed their way every comedy would have a tragic
ending and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly
artificial, but they have no sense of art.
Each time that one loves is the only time that one has ever loved.
Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely
intensifies it.
The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but
self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of
the rich.
Human life is the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there is
nothing else of any value. It is true that as one watches life in its
curious crucible of pain and pleasure one cannot wear over one's face a
mask of glass nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and
making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen
dreams. There are poisons so subtle that to know their properties one
has to sicken of them. There are maladies so strange that one has to
pass through them if one seeks to understand their nature. And yet what
a great reward one receives! How wonderful the whole world becomes to
one! To note the curious, hard logic of passion and the emotional,
coloured life of the intellect--to observe where they meet, and where
they separate, at what point they are in unison and at what point they
are in discord--there is a delight in that! What matter what the cost
is? One can never pay too high a price for any sensation.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money
than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
That is the misery of being poor.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist--that is
all.
Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated
by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break
the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad without ever doing anything bad.
He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin
his true perfection.
Mediaeval art is charming, but mediaeval emotions are out of date. One can
use them in fiction, of course; but then the only things that one can
use in fiction are the only things that one has ceased to use in fact.
Man is complete in himself.
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value
of nothing.
It's the old, old story. Love--well, not at first sight--but love at the
end of the season, which is so much more satisfactory.
No nice girl should ever waltz with such particularly younger sons! It
looks so fast!
Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.
Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give
us now and then some of those luxurious, sterile emotions that have a
certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They
are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
What is the difference between literature and journalism? Journalism is
unreadable and literature is unread.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked
and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
My husband is a sort of promissory note; I am tired of meeting him.
Conscience makes egotists of us all.
Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman
over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they
have a history.
There is a fatality about good resolutions-they are always made too
late.
We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of
life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That
is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely
uncivilised. Civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain
to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being
cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity
of being either, so they stagnate.
What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with
any woman so long as he does not love her.
The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is
the fatality of faith and the lesson of romance.
In the common world of fact the wicked are not punished nor the good
rewarded. Success is given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.
Nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be
able to rob a man at all. What a man really has is what is in him. What
is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.
Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I
consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age
is a form of the grossest immorality.
Perplexity and mistrust fan affection into passion, and so bring about
those beautiful tragedies that alone make life worth living. Women once
felt this, while men did not, and so women once ruled the world.
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's, face. It cannot be
concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such
things.
If a wretched man has a vice it shows itself in the lines of his mouth,
the drop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.
There are sins whose fascination is more in the memory than in the doing
of them, strange triumphs that gratify the pride more than the passions
and give to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than they
bring or can ever bring to the senses.
No civilised man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilised man ever
knows what a pleasure is.
As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is
arrested. If you want to mar a nature you have merely to reform it.
Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to
individualism.
Some years ago people went about the country saying that property has
duties. It is perfectly true. Property not merely has duties, but has so
many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore. If
property had simply pleasures we could stand it, but its duties make it
unbearable.
It is through joy that the individualism of the future will develop
itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently
the individualism that He preached to man could be realised only through
pain or in solitude.
Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the
prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honour.
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad
artists. Good artists exist simply on what they make, and consequently
are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
What are the virtues? Nature, Renan tells us, cares little about
chastity, and it may be that it is to the shame of the Magdalen, and not
to their own purity, that the Lucretias of modern life owe their freedom
from stain. Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal
part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils.
The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so
much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect
development. It must be merged in instinct before we become fine.
Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and
self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that
old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the
world, and which even now makes its victims day by day and has its
altars in the land. Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you.
Not I. Not anyone. It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal,
for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by
his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his
martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors and all the bachelors
like married men.
The higher education of men is what I should like to see. Men need it so
sadly.
The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a
middle-class education.
Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of
physical weakness in the old.
Our husbands never appreciate anything in us. We have to go to others
for that.
Most women in London nowadays seem to furnish their rooms with nothing
but orchids, foreigners and French novels.
The canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of
art.
Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a
ceremony as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere
character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such
plays delightful to us. Is sincerity such a terrible thing? I think not.
It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young.
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all
creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse
their rhymes are the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having
published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible.
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry
that they dare not realise.
Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as humanity treats its
gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for
them.
If a man treats life artistically his brain is his heart.
The 'Peerage' is the one book a young man about town should know
thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever
done.
The world has always laughed at its own tragedies, that being the only
way in which it has been able to bear them. Consequently whatever the
world has treated seriously belongs to the comedy side of things.
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint
has a past and every sinner has a future.
What is termed sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the
world would stagnate or grow old or becomes colourless. By its curiosity
it increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified
assertion of individualism it saves us from the commonplace. In its
rejection of the current notions about morality it is one with the
higher ethics.
Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to
vulgarise them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but
cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
Individualism does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It
comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all
development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms
grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life and
toward which every mode of life quickens. Individualism exercises no
compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should
suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force
people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let
alone. Man will develop individualism out of himself. Man is now so
developing individualism. To ask whether individualism is practical is
like asking whether evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of
life, and there is no evolution except towards individualism.
The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough
for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, 'les
grand peres ont toujours tort. '
No woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have
anything to say but they say it charmingly.
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If
the cave men had known how to laugh history would have been different.
I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most
premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not
rational.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
To get into the best society nowadays one has either to feed people,
amuse people, or shock people--that is all.
You should never try to understand women. Women are pictures, men are
problems. If you want to know what a woman really means--which, by the
way, is always a dangerous thing to do--look at her, don't listen to
her.
Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. They are limited to
their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds
as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is
no mystery in any of them. They ride in the park in the morning and
chatter at tea parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped
smile and their fashionable mauve.
Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary
charm in them--sometimes.
To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one
out from so much.
The people who have adored me--there have not been very many, but there
have been some--have always insisted on living on long after I had
ceased to care for them or they to care for me. They have become stout
and tedious, and when I meet them they go in at once for reminiscences.
That awful memory of women! What a fearful thing it is! And what an
utter intellectual stagnation it reveals!
Examinations are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a
gentleman he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman whatever
he knows is bad for him.
Credit is the capital of a younger son, and he can live charmingly on
it.
The object of art is not simply truth but complex beauty. Art itself is
really a form of exaggeration, and selection, which is the very spirit
of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.
The popular cry of our time is: 'Let us return to Life and Nature, they
will recreate Art for us and send the red blood coursing through her
veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and make her hand strong. '
But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and well-meant efforts. Nature
is always behind the age. And as for life, she is the solvent that
breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house.
There are only two kinds of women--the plain and the coloured. The plain
women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for
respectability you have merely to take them down to supper. The other
women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however--they paint in
order to try and look young.
The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it
on the tight-rope. When the verities become acrobats we can judge them.
Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. . . . The Greeks with
their quick, artistic instinct understood this, and set in the bride's
chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children
as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her
pain. They knew that life gains from art not merely spirituality, depth
of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can
form herself on the very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the
dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came this
objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They
felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly
right.
Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of
the intellect--simply a confession of failure.
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid
that others might pick them up.
What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a
question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young
men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and
cannot--that is all one can say.
Modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and
absolutely wrong. We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the
vesture of the muses, and spent our days in the sordid streets and
hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside
with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our
birthright for a mess of facts.
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the
senses but the soul.
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is
something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
Those who live in marble or on painted panel know of life but a single
exquisite instant, eternal, indeed, in its beauty but limited to one
note of passion or one mood of calm. Those whom the poet makes live have
their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courage and despair, of
pleasure and of suffering. The seasons come and go in glad or saddening
pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the years pass by before them.
They have their youth and their manhood, they are children, and they
grow old. It is always dawn for St Helena as Veronese saw her at the
window. Through the still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of
God's pain. The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads from
her brow. On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the lovers
of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon--of noon made
so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim, naked girl dip
into the marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long
fingers of the lute player rest idly upon the chords. It is twilight
always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free among the silver
poplars of France. In eternal twilight they move, those frail,
diaphanous figures, whose tremulous, white feet seem not to touch the
dew-drenched grass they tread on. But those who walk in epos, drama, or
romance see through the labouring months the young moons wax and wane,
and watch the night from evening into morning star, and from sunrise
into sun-setting can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow.
For them, as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the earth, that
green-tressed goddess, as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for
their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment of perfection.
The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of
growth or change. If they know nothing of death it is because they know
little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and
to those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not
merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of
glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be
truly realised by literature alone. It is literature that shows us the
body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.
Behind every exquisite thing that exists there is something tragic.
Worlds have to be in travail that the merest flower may blow.
Beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs
no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like
sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark water of that silver
shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned, it has its divine right
of sovereignty.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it and
your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to
itself.
Women spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever.
He's sure to be a wonderful success. He thinks like a Tory and talks
like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.
Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.
We make gods of men and they leave us. Others make brutes of them and
they fawn and are faithful.
The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.
To me beauty is the Wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do
not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
The thoroughly well-informed man is the modern ideal. And the mind of
the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a
bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above
its proper value.
Women have no appreciation of good looks in men--at least good women
have none.
To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think
his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are
not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are
borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part
that has not been written for him.
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the
faithless who know love's tragedies.
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his
own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were
meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of
beauty.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got
one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and
consequently they all appreciate me.
The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of
the man who expresses it.
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no
principles better than anything else in the world.
He who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly and
absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science;
or a young student at the university, or one who watches sheep upon a
moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God,
like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who
throws his nets into the sea. It does not matter what he is as long as
he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him.
The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature
perfectly--that is what each of us is here for.
There is no such thing as a good influence. All influence is
immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view.
Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as
rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the
Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than
that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and
passion and spirituality are theirs also--are theirs, indeed, alone.
There is nothing so absolutely pathetic as a really fine paradox. The
pun is the clown among jokes, the well-turned paradox is the polished
comedian, and the highest comedy verges upon tragedy, just as the
keenest edge of tragedy is often tempered by a subtle humour. Our minds
are shot with moods as a fabric is shot with colours, and our moods
often seem inappropriate. Everything that is true is inappropriate.
The longer one studies life and literature the more strongly one feels
that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that
it is not the moment that makes the man but the man who creates the age.
To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole
cask.
It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts
longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such
pains to over-educate ourselves.
The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit
at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory they
are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.
To have a capacity for a passion, and not to realise it is to make
oneself incomplete and limited.
Even in actual life egotism is not without its attractions. When people
talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us
about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could
shut them up when they become wearisome as easily as one can shut up a
book of which one has grown wearied they would be perfect absolutely.
Every great man nowadays has his disciples and it is invariably Judas
who writes the biography.
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is
not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil
rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forest knows of, birds
that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can
draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the 'forms
more real than living man,' and hers the great archetypes, of which
things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her
eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and
when she calls monsters from the deep they come. She can bid the
almond-tree blossom in winter and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield.
At her word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of
June, and the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian
hills. The dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown
fauns smile strangely at her when she comes near them.
