The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde
By Oscar Wilde
4/5
()
About this ebook
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on the 16th October 1854 and died on the 30th November 1900. He was an Irish playwright, poet, and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. Several of his plays continue to be widely performed, especially The Importance of Being Earnest.
Read more from Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Picture Of Dorian Gray Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Works Of Oscar Wilde Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Greatest Christmas Stories of All Time: Timeless Classics That Celebrate the Season Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings50 Great Love Letters You Have To Read (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde: Inspiring and Amazing Quotes from an Icon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA House of Pomegranates Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Comedies: Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, A Woman of No Importance, and The Importance of Being Earnest Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDe Profundis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Importance of Being Earnest: A Play Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Penny Dreadfuls MEGAPACK ®: 10 Classic Shockers! Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Blood, Sperm, Black Velvet: The Seminal Book Of English Decadence (1888-1908) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings50 Beautiful Christmas Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Gothic Classics: 60+ Books in One Volume Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsComplete Works of Oscar Wilde Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My Own Dear Darling Boy: The Letters of Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOscar Wilde: A Life in Letters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde
Related ebooks
Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Complete Works of Oscar Wilde Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My Own Dear Darling Boy: The Letters of Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSalomé Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Short Stories Of Oscar Wilde: "I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best." Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Viva la Repartee: Clever Comebacks and Witty Retorts from History's Great Wits and Wordsmiths Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Intentions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Picture of Dorian Gray Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Importance of Being Earnest Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Don Juan Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/550 Great Love Letters You Have To Read (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sonnets Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAnna Karenina Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crime and Punishment Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAphorisms: Gifted One-Liners Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWilliam Shakespeare’s Sonnets: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On the Pleasure of Hating Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Death Of Ivan Ilyich Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Diary of a Nobody Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Curious Phrases Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Shakespeare's Sonnets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Be Sarcastic: Revised and Expanded Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ifferisms: An Anthology of Aphorisms That Begin with the Word "IF" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Notes from the Underground Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Plays of Oscar Wilde Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Moby Dick Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShort Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Happy Prince and Other Tales Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
General Fiction For You
The Alchemist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anonymous Sex Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5You: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist: A Graphic Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The King James Version of the Bible Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Priory of the Orange Tree Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Unhoneymooners Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Dry: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meditations: Complete and Unabridged Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything's Fine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Good and Evil Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nettle & Bone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Foster Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Second Life of Mirielle West: A Haunting Historical Novel Perfect for Book Clubs Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The City of Dreaming Books Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Other Black Girl: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Cabin at the End of the World: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde
2 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde - Oscar Wilde
The Wit and Wisdom of
Oscar Wilde
SELECTED AND EDITED BY
BOB AND ODETTE BLAISDELL
Dover Publications, Inc.
Mineola, New York
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde is a new work, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2012.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900.
The wit and wisdom of Oscar Wilde / Oscar Wilde; selected and edited by Bob and Odette Blaisdell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN-13: 978-0-486-16842-5
1. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900—Quotations. I. Blaisdell, Robert.
II. Blaisdell, Odette. III. Title.
PR5812.B54 2012
828′.809—dc22
2010048401
Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
48092501
www.doverpublications.com
Contents
INTRODUCTION
1.RULES TO LIVE BY
2.MEN VERSUS WOMEN
3.DEFINITIONS
4.ART WITH A CAPITAL A
5.THE AGES
6.WRITERS AND WRITING
7.DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS
8.LOVE, FRIENDSHIP AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE
9.EDUCATION
10.THE MASK OF STYLE
11.CIVILIZED SOCIETY
12.AMERICA AND AMERICANS
13.MARRIAGE
14.SUFFERING AND IMPRISONMENT
15.TALK
16.THE END OF WISDOM
SOURCES
Introduction
The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder …
—De Profundis
Notwithstanding Wilde’s disapproval of the public’s interest in the biography of the artist, his life is one of the most interesting and compelling and finally unfortunately tragic in literature. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854 to the wealthy and witty Jane Francesca Wilde (a writer known as Speranza
) and Dr. William Wilde. After starring at Trinity College, Dublin, in Classics, he won a scholarship to Oxford in 1874. A genius who fairly ranked himself as a genius, he published poems and plays, toured and lectured, wrote stories and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), before hitting his full stride in 1892 with his comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan, followed shortly after by A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and his and perhaps English literature’s funniest play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Although he married in 1884 and fathered two boys, whom he adored, he was homosexual, and sometimes quite openly and proudly so, in spite of the dangers and disgrace any public revelation of it in London would mean at the time. His devotion to the selfish young Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie,
as Wilde called him), led him into a hopeless lawsuit for libel against Douglas’s father, the Marquis of Queensbury. The disastrous result of this was that Wilde himself was arrested for committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons
and imprisoned for two years. His wife divorced him and he lost any legal connection to his children. After his release from prison in 1897, he left England for France. Always bad with money and now at a loss for writing, he struggled to make ends meet and lived on the generosity of friends. He died in 1900, from complications related, so argues his biographer Richard Ellmann, to syphilis.
In order to have a fresh appreciation of Wilde’s wonderful wit and wisdom, my daughter Odette and I have harvested the quotations not from previous quotation collections but from the primary and secondary sources listed at the end of this book. Wilde composed (and thought and spoke) on the look-out for epigrammatic statements. When he was witty, he was very witty; even when he was not much in the mood he was witty. (We could have quoted everything but the stage-directions from The Importance of Being Earnest. Everybody is funny.) In the comedies before The Importance of Being Earnest, there are usually two or three designated wit-makers.
Discounting the poetry and children’s stories, the wit is practically the work: wit delighting in its own play; wit for wit’s sake. In the lone novel of his career, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the goading Lord Henry cannot seem to help himself from delivering bon mot after bon mot. Word-play and paradoxical summation was a compulsion for Wilde. In one of his early plays, Vera, a character remarks of another: He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone.
(In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian remarks wonderingly at Lord Henry: You would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram.
) On the other hand, in spite of his delight in the keen put-down, Wilde was a devoted and kind friend and man. The crashing down of his sensational career was a brutal shock; he reflected during his imprisonment in 1897: I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say, quite simply and without affectation, that the two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.
Prison refined and revealed some of the wisdom he was previously inclined to mock in himself and others. He was always determinedly surprising himself into new discoveries about what he really believed and felt.
The source cited for a few of the quotations may surprise those acquainted with Wilde’s words; Wilde, having found just the right sparkle to an observation, sometimes repeated himself:
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
—Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 4 (1890)
Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
—Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance,
Act 3 (1893)
Or he kept refining himself:
Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.
—Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Ch. 15
Moderation is a fatal thing, Lady Hunstanton. Nothing succeeds like excess.
—Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance,
Act 3
There are many ways to categorize precious gems, and we have made categories that Wilde’s interests seemed to suggest (e.g. Distinguishing Characteristics
; Talk
; Writers and Writing
). On the use of quotation marks: in the plays and critical dialogues (e.g. The Critic as Artist), we have not used quotation marks, noting instead the name of the character. In the fiction, we have used quotation marks to distinguish the characters’ words from the narrator’s. In the quoted conversations by Wilde’s interviewers, acquaintances and friends, quotation marks distinguish those representations from Wilde’s own composed words; almost always, Wilde quoted himself better than anyone else could. As Ellmann notes: Many renderings of Wilde’s conversation stultify his wit, and for the way he really talked one has to fall back on his letters.
His letters? If Wilde had had use of instant messaging, his fame and wit would have spread even faster and wider! His