Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man. Wilde Oscar

seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it. Things last either too long or not long enough.

      If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.

      We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

      Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. It is the symbol of symbols. It reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

      Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. Women have a more subtle instinct about things. What they like is to be a man's last romance.

      Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful but the stupid who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.

      One regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

      It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection; through art and through art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

      A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule.

      It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthrals us.

      When a woman finds out that her husband is absolutely indifferent to her, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for.

      It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.

      It is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour-that is all.

      It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For when the ideal is realised it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.

      People who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others have. The only difference is that their moods are rather meaningless.

      It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

      Good women have such a limited view of life, their horizon is so small, their interests so petty. The fact is they are not modern, and to be modern is the only thing worth being nowadays.

      Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

      Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.

      All men are married women's property. That is the only true definition of what married women's property really is.

      I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice. As a man sows so let him reap.

      Nothing refines but the intellect.

      It is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth. It is the first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful position, and I am really quite inexperienced in doing anything of the kind.

      The man who regards his past is a man who deserves to have no future to look forward to.

      Just as it is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life that we call nationality, so, by curious inversion, it is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality of others; and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.

      Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

      All women become like their mothers: that is their tragedy. No man does: that is his.

      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.