Only dull people are bri.., p.3
Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast,
p.3
It is only very ugly or very beautiful women who ever hide their faces.
If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
Why is it that one runs to one’s ruin? Why has destruction such a fascination?
One needs misfortunes to live happily.
To live in happiness, you must know some unhappiness in life.
The happy people of the world have their value, but only the negative value of foils. They throw up and emphasize the beauty and the fascination of the unhappy.
What fire does not destroy, it hardens.
Suffering and the community of suffering makes people kind.
While to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.
There is no truth comparable to Sorrow. There are times when Sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.
All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.
Nothing succeeds like excess.
Pure modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarizing.
Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.
The value of the telephone is the value of what two people have to say.
Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still.
You people who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others have. The only difference is that your moods are rather meaningless.
There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathize, no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive.
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
There is no such thing as morality, for there is no general rule of spiritual health; it is all personal, individual.
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.
Manners are of more importance than morals.
The moral is too obvious.
I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.
Music is the art … which most completely realizes the artistic idea, and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.
Music … creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.
If one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music, people don’t talk.
I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says.
Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.
The things of nature do not really belong to us; we should leave them to our children as we have received them.
In nature there is, for me at any rate, healing power.
We all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture.
Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.
Nature is always behind the age.
Whenever we have returned to Life and Nature, our work has always become vulgar, common, and uninteresting.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Of course I plagiarize. It is the privilege of the appreciative man.
It is only the unimaginative who ever invent. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.
Every word in a play has a musical as well as an intellectual value, and must be made expressive of a certain emotion.
I never write plays for anyone. I write plays to amuse myself. After, if people want to act in them, I sometimes allow them to do so.
There are two ways of disliking my plays. One is to dislike them, the other is to like Earnest.
Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy he is in harmony with himself and his environment.
No civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?
I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does to the full. There was no pleasure I did not experience.
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
I don’t like principles … I prefer prejudices.
It is personalities, not principles, that move the age.
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.
One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
It would be unfair to expect other people to be as remarkable as oneself.
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
BOCCACCIO · Mrs Rosie and the Priest
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS · As kingfishers catch fire
The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
THOMAS DE QUINCEY · On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE · Aphorisms on Love and Hate
JOHN RUSKIN · Traffic
PU SONGLING · Wailing Ghosts
JONATHAN SWIFT · A Modest Proposal
Three Tang Dynasty Poets
WALT WHITMAN · On the Beach at Night Alone
KENKŌ · A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees
BALTASAR GRACIÁN · How to Use Your Enemies
JOHN KEATS · The Eve of St Agnes
THOMAS HARDY · Woman much missed
GUY DE MAUPASSANT · Femme Fatale
MARCO POLO · Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls
SUETONIUS · Caligula
APOLLONIUS OF RHODES · Jason and Medea
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON · Olalla
KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS · The Communist Manifesto
PETRONIUS · Trimalchio’s Feast
JOHANN PETER HEBEL · How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher’s Dog
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN · The Tinder Box
RUDYARD KIPLING · The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
DANTE · Circles of Hell
HENRY MAYHEW · Of Street Piemen
HAFEZ · The nightingales are drunk
GEOFFREY CHAUCER · The Wife of Bath
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE · How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing
THOMAS NASHE · The Terrors of the Night
EDGAR ALLAN POE · The Tell-Tale Heart
MARY KINGSLEY · A Hippo Banquet
JANE AUSTEN · The Beautifull Cassandra
ANTON CHEKHOV · Gooseberries
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE · Well, they are gone, and here must I remain
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE · Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings
CHARLES DICKENS · The Great Winglebury Duel
HERMAN MELVILLE · The Maldive Shark
ELIZABETH GASKELL · The Old Nurse’s Story
NIKOLAY LESKOV · The Steel Flea
HONORÉ DE BALZAC · The Atheist’s Mass
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN · The Yellow Wall-Paper
C. P. CAVAFY · Remember, Body …
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY · The Meek One
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT · A Simple Heart
NIKOLAI GOGOL · The Nose
SAMUEL PEPYS · The Great Fire of London
EDITH WHARTON · The Reckoning
HENRY JAMES · The Figure in the Carpet
WILFRED OWEN · Anthem For Doomed Youth
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART · My Dearest Father
PLATO · Socrates’ Defence
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI · Goblin Market
Sindbad the Sailor
SOPHOCLES · Antigone
RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA · The Life of a Stupid Man
LEO TOLSTOY · How Much Land Does A Man Need?
GIORGIO VASARI · Leonardo da Vinci
OSCAR WILDE · Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
SHEN FU · The Old Man of the Moon
AESOP · The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon
MATSUO BASHŌ · Lips too Chilled
EMILY BRONTË · The Night is Darkening Round Me
JOSEPH CONRAD · To-morrow
RICHARD HAKLUYT · The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe
KATE CHOPIN · A Pair of Silk Stockings
CHARLES DARWIN · It was snowing butterflies
BROTHERS GRIMM · The Robber Bridegroom
CATULLUS · I Hate and I Love
HOMER · Circe and the Cyclops
D. H. LAWRENCE · Il Duro
KATHERINE MANSFIELD · Miss Brill
OVID · The Fall of Icarus
SAPPHO · Come Close
IVAN TURGENEV · Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands
VIRGIL · O Cruel Alexis
H. G. WELLS · A Slip under the Microscope
HERODOTUS · The Madness of Cambyses
Speaking of Siva
The Dhammapada
JANE AUSTEN · Lady Susan
JEAN-JACQUES ROSSEAU · The Body Politic
JEAN DE LA FONTAINE · The World is Full of Foolish Men
H. G. WELLS · The Sea Raiders
LIVY · Hannibal
CHARLES DICKENS · To Be Read at Dusk
LEO TOLSTOY · The Death of Ivan Ilyich
MARK TWAIN · The Stolen White Elephant
WILLIAM BLAKE · Tyger, Tyger
SHERIDAN LE FANU · Green Tea
The Yellow Book
OLAUDAH EQUIANO · Kidnapped
EDGAR ALLAN POE · A Modern Detective
The Suffragettes
MARGERY KEMPE · How To Be a Medieval Woman
JOSEPH CONRAD · Typhoon
GIACOMO CASANOVA · The Nun of Murano
W. B. YEATS · A terrible beauty is born
THOMAS HARDY · The Withered Arm
EDWARD LEAR · Nonsense
ARISTOPHANES · The Frogs
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE · Why I Am so Clever
RAINER MARIA RILKE · Letters to a Young Poet
LEONID ANDREYEV · Seven Hanged
APHRA BEHN · Oroonoko
LEWIS CARROLL · O frabjous day!
JOHN GAY · Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London
E. T. A. HOFFMANN · The Sandman
DANTE · Love that moves the sun and other stars
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN · The Queen of Spades
ANTON CHEKHOV · A Nervous Breakdown
KAKUZO OKAKURA · The Book of Tea
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE · Is this a dagger which I see before me?
EMILY DICKINSON · My life had stood a loaded gun
LONGUS · Daphnis and Chloe
MARY SHELLEY · Matilda
GEORGE ELIOT · The Lifted Veil
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY · White Nights
OSCAR WILDE · Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast
VIRGINIA WOOLF · Flush
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE · Lot No. 249
The Rule of Benedict
WASHINGTON IRVING · Rip Van Winkle
Anecdotes of the Cynics
VICTOR HUGO · Waterloo
CHARLOTTE BRONTË · Stancliffe’s Hotel
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THE BEGINNING
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This selection first published in Penguin Classics 2016
ISBN: 978-0-241-25181-2
Oscar Wilde, Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast
