Oscar Wilde

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  ONLY DULL PEOPLE ARE BRILLIANT AT BREAKFAST

  Contents

  Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast

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  OSCAR WILDE

  Born 1854, Dublin, Ireland

  Died 1900, Paris, France

  This selection is taken from Nothing … Except My Genius: The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde, Penguin Classics, 2010.

  WILDE IN PENGUIN CLASSICS

  De Profundis and Other Prison Writings

  The Complete Short Fiction

  The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

  The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose

  The Canterville Ghost, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

  The Decay of Lying: And Other Essays

  Nothing … Except My Genius: The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde

  Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime

  To know nothing about their great men is one of the necessary elements of English education.

  We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art.

  The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one’s own perfection, to make one’s every dream a reality.

  To me the life of the businessman who eats his breakfast early in the morning, catches a train for the city, stays there in the dingy, dusty atmosphere of the commercial world, and goes back to his house in the evening, and after supper to sleep, is worse than the life of the galley slave – his chains are golden instead of iron.

  Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

  … nothing is worth doing except what the world says is impossible.

  To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist – the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one’s vinegar.

  Life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

  There is always more brass than brains in an aristocracy.

  Good kings are the only dangerous enemies that modern democracy has.

  I have always been of the opinion that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative …

  … the British cook is a foolish woman, who should be turned, for her iniquities, into a pillar of that salt which she never knows how to use.

  Of Shakespeare it may be said he was the first to see the dramatic value of doublets, and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.

  … the stage is not merely the meeting-place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

  The true dramatist … shows us life under the conditions of art, not art in the form of life.

  … our ordinary English novelists … fail … in concentration of style. Their characters are far too eloquent and talk themselves to tatters. What we want is a little more reality and a little less rhetoric … we wish that they would talk less and think more.

  They lead us through a barren desert of verbiage to a mirage that they call life: we wander aimlessly through a very wilderness of words in search of one touch of nature. However, one should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

  A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

  … a poet without hysterics is rare.

  There is no such thing as a stupid American. Many Americans are horrid, vulgar, intrusive and impertinent, just as many English people are also; but stupidity is not one of the national vices. Indeed, in America there is no opening for a fool. They expect brains even from a boot-black, and get them.

  As for marriage, it is one of their most popular institutions. The American man marries early, and the American woman marries often; and they get on extremely well together.

  America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself.

  … it would be a very good thing if people were taught how to speak. Language is the noblest instrument we have, either for the revealing or the concealing of thought; talk itself is a sort of spiritualized action; and conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.

  The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history.

  Early in life she had discovered the important truth that nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion; and by a series of reckless escapades, half of them quite harmless, she had acquired all the privileges of a personality. She had more than once changed her husband; indeed, Debrett credits her with three marriages; but as she had never changed her lover, the world had long ago ceased to talk scandal about her.

  Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

  Nobody, even in the provinces, should ever be allowed to ask an intelligent question about pure mathematics across a dinner table. A question of this kind is quite as bad as inquiring suddenly about the state of a man’s soul …

  But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.

  The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

  I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

  I have always been of opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.

  All that is known by that term [fin de siècle] I particularly admire and love. It is the fine flower of our civilization: the only thing that keeps the world from the commonplace, the coarse, the barbarous.

  Flaubert did not write French prose, but the prose of a great artist who happened to be French.

  I was thinking in bed this morning that the great superiority 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.

  Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.

  I have made an important discovery … that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effects of intoxication.

  Missionaries, my dear! Don’t you realize that missionaries are the divinely provided food for destitute and underfed cannibals? Whenever they are on the brink of starvation, Heaven in its infinite mercy sends them a nice plump missionary.

  Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.

  My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature … Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.

  Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.

  In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.

  I quite admit that modern novels have many good points. All I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite unreadable.

  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.

  Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarizing mankind.

  Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.

  Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life … Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realizes in fact what has been dreamed in fiction.

  … imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult.

  Yesterday evening Mrs Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasized.

  The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music.

  The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

  To become a work of art is the object of living.

  The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.

  There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dénouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the
hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display.

  All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.

  It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal. I hope you will never fall into that error. If you do, you will be sorry for it.

  You forget that a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

  Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognizance … It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.

  A critic should be taught to criticize a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author. This, in fact, is the beginning of criticism.

  Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

  Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.

  Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

  Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

  Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

  It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is the reason why music is the perfect type of art.

  Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.

  … life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it. Things last either too long or not long enough.

  … all the arts are immoral, except those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek to excite to action of evil or of good. For action of every kind belongs to the sphere of ethics. The aim of art is simply to create a mood.

  There is no country in the world so much in need of unpractical people as this country of ours. With us, Thought is degraded by its constant association with practice … We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.

  The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.

  It is so easy for people to have sympathy with suffering. It is so difficult for them to have sympathy with thought.

  An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

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

  For what is Truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one’s last mood.

  There are two ways of disliking art … One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally.

  A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

  Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

  Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

  There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

  Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

  All art is at once surface and symbol.

  Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

  Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

  It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

  When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

  We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

  Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

  There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

  There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

  Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

  With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

  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.

  High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

  The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

  A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament … the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman.

  Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

  In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.

  In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.

  In England, Journalism, except in a few well-known instances, not having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary. The fact is that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole. That is much worse.

  Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature – it requires, in fact, that nature of a true Individualist – to sympathize with a friend’s success.

  Work is the curse of the drinking classes of this country.

  Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.

  A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.

  Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

  The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy.

  One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers.

  The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

  Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

  Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.

  A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

  Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

  The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.