Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900, Irish-born writer. Renowned as a wit in London literary circles, he achieved recognition with The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a novel. He also wrote plays of lively dialogue, such as The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and poetry, including The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898).
The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night.
Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.
People who love only once in their lives are . . . shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect- simply a confession of failures.
