Oscar Wilde quotes. Oscar Wilde - aphorisms, quotes, sayings. Friendship is more tragic than love - it dies much longer

Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde was born October 16, 1854 in Dublin. Irish poet, playwright, writer, essayist. The author of works - "The Picture of Dorian Gray", "The Canterville Ghost", "Ravenna", "Sphinx", "The Ballad of Reading Prison", "Salome", "The Importance of Being Earnest", etc. Died in France on November 30, 1900.

Aphorisms, quotes, sayings Oscar Wilde

• Only empty people know themselves.
• Everything can be experienced except death.
• The lies of poetry are truer than the truth of life.
• Vanity is the last refuge of a loser.
• Journalism is organized slander.
• A real artist never notices the audience.
• The basis for all gossip is the belief in immorality.
• Life is too complicated to be taken seriously.
• English common sense is the inherited stupidity of the fathers.
• If you want to spoil a person, start re-educating him.
• Love must forgive all sins, but not the sin against love.
• The only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it.
• Philosophy teaches us to deal with the failures of others with equanimity.
• The public is surprisingly tolerant: it forgives everything except genius.
• Our only duty to history is to constantly rewrite it.
• Modern democracy has only one dangerous enemy - the good monarch.
• When a person comes to visit, he spends not his time, but the time of the hosts.
• Democracy is fooling the people with the help of the people for the good of the people.
• After a good meal, you can forgive anyone, even your relatives.
• When they release me, I will simply move from one prison to another.
• When they talk about you, then only one thing can be worse than this - when they don’t talk about you.
• A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, but a lot of sincerity is a fatal thing.
• Nothing gets in the way of a romance like a woman's sense of humor or a man's lack of it.
• Only a truly good woman can do a truly stupid thing.
• Every woman is a rebel by nature, and she rebels exclusively against herself.
• Ugly women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful - not before, they are jealous of strangers.
• Children begin with love for their parents. Growing up, they begin to judge them. Sometimes they forgive them.
• Whenever a person commits stupidity, he does it from the most noble motives.
• Society has a truly insatiable curiosity about everything that does not deserve curiosity.
• Fashion is a form of ugliness so unbearable that we have to change it every six months.
• Secret information is almost always the source of a great fortune and the result of a public scandal.
• If a person judges something sensibly, this is a sure sign that he himself is incompetent in this area.
• In its defense, journalism can refer to the great Darwinian law of the survival of the mediocre.
• The story of woman is the story of the most monstrous tyranny the world has ever known: the tyranny of the weak over the strong.
• When a person falls in love, he starts by deceiving himself and ends by deceiving others.
• Ah, don't say you agree with me! When people say they agree with me, I always feel like I'm wrong.
• You should never trust a woman who tells you her age. A woman capable of this is capable of anything.
• With each of our extraordinary actions, we make an enemy for ourselves. To be popular, you have to be mediocre.
• Women treat us men the same way humanity treats its gods: they worship us and annoy us, constantly demanding something.
• I would wholeheartedly advise you not to bend under the burden of grief. What appears to us as severe trials is sometimes actually a blessing in disguise.
• Life gives a person, at best, a single unique moment, and the secret of happiness is to repeat this moment as often as possible.
• Marriage without love is terrible. But there is something even worse: it is a marriage in which there is love, but only on one side; fidelity, but only on one side. In such a marriage of two hearts, one is undoubtedly broken.
• If you cannot rant about morality at least twice a week before a large and completely immoral audience, the political field is closed to you.
• The only thing we can say about human nature is that it changes. Change is the only quality that can be predicted... Systems that fail are those that rely on the immutability of human nature rather than on its growth and development.
• Most marriages break up nowadays primarily because of the good sense of the husband. Indeed, how can a woman be happy with a man who considers her an absolutely rational being.
  

Release theme: Oscar Wilde - quotes and phrases from books and personal statements:

• I'm dying as I lived - beyond my means.
• ... Life is too important to talk about it seriously.
• I always surprise myself. It's the only thing worth living for.
• Atheism needs religion just as much as faith.
• Other people's dramas are always unbearably banal.
• Most of us are not us. Our thoughts are the judgments of others; our life is mimicry.

• A person must absorb the colors of life, but never remember the details. The details are always banal.
• Be yourself, the rest of the roles are taken.
• The foundation of literary friendship is the exchange of poisoned glasses.
• In America, in the Rocky Mountains, I saw the only reasonable method of art criticism. In the bar, a sign hung over the piano: "Do not shoot the pianist - he does everything he can."
• Killing is always a miss. You should never do anything that you can't talk to people about after dinner.
• Only two tragedies are possible in life: the first is not to get what you dream of, the second is to get. Lady Windermere's Fan book
• 
  I have unpretentious taste: the best is enough for me
• In the real world of facts, the sinners are not punished, the righteous are not rewarded. Success comes to the strong, failure to the weak. That's all. The Picture of Dorian Gray book
• It's hard to avoid the future.
• A thing is something that can be seen in it...
• What you really need to know, no one will teach.
• Time is a waste of money.
• Only empty people know themselves. book "Testaments to the Young Generation"
• We're all in the gutter, but some of us are stargazing. Lady Windermere's Fan book
• Now a good upbringing is just a hindrance. It shields you from too much.
• Whenever a person commits stupidity, he does it from the most noble motives.
• There is only one sin - stupidity. The Critic as an Artist book
• Children begin with love for their parents. Growing up, they begin to judge them. Sometimes they forgive them.
• Arguing is so vulgar. After all, in a decent society they always adhere to the same opinion book "A Wonderful Rocket"
• The only thing you will never regret is our mistakes and delusions.
• 
  Laughter is a good start to a friendship, and laughter is a good way to end it.
• Naturalness is just a pose, and also the most annoying of all that I know.
• Punctuality is the thief of time.
• Life is never fair. For most of us, it's probably better that way.
• A poet can endure anything but a typo.
• Knowing your friends is an extremely dangerous thing.
• The concept of good and evil is accessible only to those who are deprived of all other concepts.
• Art is the most expressive of all known forms of individualism. book "The soul of man under socialism"
• Patriotism is a great frenzy.
• What is true in a person's life is not his deeds, but the legends that surround him. Legends should never be destroyed. Through them we can vaguely see the true face of a person.
• Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
• What a beautiful moon today! - Yes, but if you had seen her before the war...
• Society often forgives the offender. But not a dreamer.
• When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers. The Perfect Husband book
• Public opinion triumphs where thought slumbers.
• The beauty of the soul grows to gain the gift of seeing God book "The Holy Harlot, or the Woman Covered with Jewels"
• Only intellect ennobles a person.
• Self-love is the beginning of a romance that lasts a lifetime. book "Testaments to the Young Generation"
• 
  A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, but absolute sincerity is simply fatal. The Critic as an Artist book
• People always laugh at their tragedies - that's the only way to endure them.
• A thought that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called a thought.
• The difference between a caprice and eternal love is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
• Prayer must remain unanswered, otherwise it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
• The world is divided into two classes - some believe in the incredible, others do the impossible.
• We consider fashionable what we ourselves wear and unfashionable what others wear.

• Motherhood is a fact. Fatherhood is an opinion.
• On the ancient Greek portal of the ancient world was inscribed: know thyself. On the portal of the modern world will be inscribed: be yourself.
• People always destroy what they love the most.
• Doing nothing is one of the most difficult things to do, the most difficult and the most intellectual. The Critic as an Artist book
• Heal the soul with sensations, and let the soul heal the sensations.
• Education is a wonderful thing, but it should be remembered at least once in a while that nothing that really needs to be learned can be taught. The Critic as an Artist book
• When they immediately agree with me, I feel that I am wrong.
• Society has a truly insatiable curiosity about everything that does not deserve curiosity.
• 

Oscar Wilde, (1854–1900), English writer

About Me

I have an unpretentious taste: the best is enough for me.

I corrected my poem for half a day and crossed out one comma. In the evening I put it back on.

Alas, half of humanity does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me.

Reality always sees me through a haze of words. I will sacrifice authenticity for the sake of a good phrase and I am ready to sacrifice truth for the sake of a good aphorism.

Actually, I don't like outdoor games. Except for dominoes. I played a few games of dominoes in cafes on the Parisian boulevards.

I never go on foot and correspond only by telegraph.

I put all the systems in one phrase, and all my life in one aphorism.

About men and women

I love men with a future and women with a past.

Women are in a much better position than men: there are more taboos for them.

Men learn life too early and women too late, that's almost the whole difference between them.

For the philosopher, women represent the triumph of matter over spirit, and men the triumph of spirit over morality.

Women usually hold all the trumps in their hands, but always lose the last bet.

Women give men the most precious things in life. But they invariably demand it back - and all in the smallest coin.

Women treat us, men, the same way as humanity treats its gods: they worship us and get bored, constantly demanding something.

Men think. Women only think that they think.

All women eventually become like their mothers. This is their tragedy. No man is like his mother. This is his tragedy.

Do you know how great female curiosity is? It almost does not yield to the male.

A woman can always be trusted, because she does not remember anything important.

A woman can make a man righteous in only one way: to annoy him so that he loses all interest in life.

The woman begins by repulsing the advance of the man, and ends by cutting off his retreat.

In fact, women love it when men are badly dressed. They are always a little afraid of the dandy and want the appearance of a man to speak against him.

Women are highly practical people. They are much more practical than us. A man in sublime moments often forgets to talk about marriage, and a woman always reminds him of this.

Do not let yourself be led astray from the path of the unrighteous! Virtuous you will be unbearably boring. This is what angers me in women. Be sure to give them a good man. Moreover, if he is good from the very beginning, they will never love him. They need to fall in love with him bad, and leave him - disgustingly good.

- Whom do you consider spoiled?
“Those men who admire innocence.
What about spoiled women?
“Oh, those women who never bother men.

Nothing harms a novel so much as a woman or a lack of it in a man.

You should never give a woman something that she cannot wear in the evenings.

Men get older, but they don't get better.

Women are made to be loved, not to be understood.

A woman is a sphinx without riddles.

Femininity is the quality I most admire in women.

If you want to know what a woman really thinks, look at her, but don't listen.

The woman thinks of nothing, or thinks of something else.

Women are a decorative floor. They have nothing to say, but everything they say is charming.

The history of women is the history of the worst kind of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. This is the only form of tyranny that still holds.

Perhaps cruelty, outright cruelty, is the sweetest thing for women: they have surprisingly strong primitive instincts. We gave them freedom, but they still remained slaves looking for a master. They love to be subdued.

Women have amazing instincts. They notice everything but the most obvious.

Women in life are wonderful actresses, but they have no artistic flair. They want to continue the performance when all interest in it has already disappeared. If they were given free rein, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would turn into a farce.

The whole charm of the past is that it is -. And the women never notice that the curtain has come down. They certainly give the sixth act!

With bad women you do not know peace, but with good women you are bored. That's the whole difference.

The first duty of a woman is to please her dressmaker. What is her second duty, has not yet been clarified.

Women are divided into two categories - unmade and made up. The first ones are very useful to us. If you want to acquire a reputation as a respectable person, all you have to do is invite such a woman to dine with you.

Only a truly good woman can do a truly stupid thing.

A woman with a past has no future.

A woman without cute mistakes is not a woman, but a female person.

London society is full of women of the most noble birth, who, of their own free will, for many years in a row remain thirty years old.

If a woman has achieved that she looks ten years younger than her daughter, she is quite satisfied with this.

She is still thirty-five years old since she was forty.

You can't trust a woman who doesn't hide her age. Such a woman can say anything.

A woman should never be too precise about her age. It reeks of pedantry.

She was created to be the wife of a messenger. She has an amazing ability to remember people's names and forget their faces.

Yesterday there was a lot of blush on her, and very little dress. In a woman, this is always a sign of despair.

Dear child! She loves photography so much, especially views of Switzerland. Unusually chaste taste.

She can speak with brilliance about any subject, provided that she knows nothing about it.

Many women have pasts, but she is said to have at least a dozen.

She retained traces of her amazing ugliness even in her old age.

It is curious that ugly women are always jealous of their husbands, but beautiful ones never. Beautiful women are not up to it - they are jealous of other people's husbands.

Tears are a refuge for ugly girls, but doom for pretty women.

Beauty is one of the types of Genius, it is even higher than Genius, because it does not require understanding.

Beauty is a gift for several years.

Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues.

Now, after all, a woman is not allowed to flirt before the age of forty and have romantic feelings before forty-five.

It's terrible how women have become calculating. No doubt, our grandmothers also happened to indulge in all serious things, but their granddaughters will certainly first figure out what it will give them.

We are all poor now, so compliments are the only offering we can afford.

Women cannot be disarmed by a compliment. Men - yes. This is the difference.

A woman will flirt with anyone, as long as they look at her at that time.

If a man once loved a woman, he will do everything for her. Except for just one thing: continue to love her.

Love always promises the impossible and makes you believe in the impossible.

Love feeds on repetition, and only repetition turns mere lust into art.

Between whim and "eternal love" the only difference is that the whim lasts a little longer.

Real great passion is now quite rare. This is the privilege of people who have nothing else to do.

Great passion is the only thing the non-working classes are capable of.

True love forgives all crimes except crimes against love.

Falling in love begins with the fact that a person deceives himself, and ends with the fact that he deceives another.

She was always in love with someone - and always hopelessly, so she kept all her .

It is very difficult not to be unfair to the one you love.

The object of passion changes, but passion always remains the one and only.

Someone said about women that they "love with their ears." And men love with their eyes.

It is not good to be like Narcissus, bending over a photograph; even water cannot be trusted; the eyes of the lover are the only reliable mirror.

Women love us for our flaws. If there are a fair amount of these shortcomings, they are ready to forgive us everything, even the mind.

It is very dangerous to meet a woman who fully understands you. It usually ends in marriage.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he is not in love with her.

It is better to adore than to be admired. someone's adoration is boring and painful.

I was loved passionately, madly. And very sorry. It has been incredibly disruptive to my life. I wouldn't mind having some free time sometimes.

A man always wants to be a woman's first love. Women are more sensitive in such matters. They would like to become the last love of a man.

I like her very much, but I'm not in love with her.
- And she is in love with you, although she does not like you very much.

How long could you love a woman who doesn't love you?
- Who doesn't love? All life.

Loyalty! Someday I will analyze this feeling. It is the greed of the owner. Much we would gladly give up if it were not for the fear that someone else would pick it up.

If you are absent for a short time, I am ready to wait for you all my life.

Superficial people, I think just those who love only once in a lifetime. Their so-called fidelity, constancy is only the lethargy of habit or lack of imagination.

The love of a married woman is a great thing. Married men never dreamed of such a thing.

For those who are faithful in love, only its banal essence is available. The tragedy of love is known only to those who change.

Self-love is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

You must always be in love. That's why you should never get married.

Nowadays, all decent people get married. Bachelors are no longer in vogue. discredited public. Too much is known about them.

Now all married men live as bachelors, and all single men live as married men.

A man who stubbornly refuses to marry turns into a constant public temptation.

Men often propose just for practice.

Usually it is not a man who proposes to a woman, but she proposes to him. Only in bourgeois circles is it different. But the bourgeoisie is behind the times.

I don't approve of long engagements. This provides an opportunity to learn the nature of the other side, which, in my opinion, is not recommended.

If we men married the women we deserve, it would be bad for us!

Men marry out of fatigue, women marry out of curiosity. Both are disappointed.

Niagara Falls is the second disappointment of the newlywed.

Marriage has the same destructive effect on a person as cigarettes, but it costs much more.

A woman marries a second time only if the first husband was disgusting to her. And a man marries again only because he loved his first wife very much.

I didn't say he was getting married. I only said that he was going to get married. It's far from the same. For example, I clearly remember that I got married, but I don’t remember at all that I was going to get married. And I tend to think that I never had such an intention.

Never marry women with straw-colored hair - they are terribly sentimental.

Women seek happiness in marriage, men put their own at stake.

The strongest foundation for marriage is mutual misunderstanding.

The happiness of a married person depends on those to whom he is not married.

Modern women understand everything except their husbands.

I am a married man, and that is the beauty of marriage, that both parties inevitably have to excel in lying.

There are too many women in London who trust their husbands. You can immediately recognize them - they have such an unhappy look.

Twenty years of love makes a ruin out of a woman; twenty years of marriage make it look like a public building.

Worse than a marriage without love can only be a marriage in which love exists only on one side.

You can immediately determine whether a man has a family or not. I have often noticed a very sad expression in the eyes of many married men.

Women have become so educated that nothing surprises them anymore - except for a happy marriage.

Nowadays it is dangerous for a husband to give his wife any attention in public. This makes everyone think that he is beating her in private. So suspicious now of everything that looks like a happy marriage.

The family breaks up much more often from the sanity of the husband than from anything else. How can a woman be happy with a man who stubbornly wants to see her as a completely rational being?

Polygamy? How much more poetic it is to have one spouse and love many.

She is so indifferent to me, as if I were her husband.

She changed husbands more than once, but she kept one lover, and therefore the gossip about her has long ceased.

When a woman feels that her husband is indifferent to her, she begins to dress too flashy and tasteless, or she gets very smart hats that someone else's husband pays for.

After burying her third husband, she became a blonde out of desperation.

Having secrets from other people's wives is a necessary luxury in our time. But trying to hide something from your wife is unforgivable frivolity. She will know anyway.

There is at least the merit in the availability of divorce, that it introduces a new element of romantic fluctuation into the marriage union. When a couple is married for the rest of their lives, how often courtesy becomes pure excess, and gallantry means nothing at all.

Divorces are made in heaven.

Women's conversations

- In my opinion, a husband should not be too charming. Is it dangerous.
“My child, a husband is never too charming!

You are not a master of compliments. I'm afraid that your wife does not encourage you in this useful habit. This is a big mistake on her part. When a man stops saying nice words, his thoughts change accordingly.

“I hope you don't lead a double life pretending to be dissolute when you really are virtuous. That would be hypocrisy.

It's good that you smoke. Every man needs something to do. And there are too many idlers in London.

“I love men over seventy. They always offer women love to the grave. In my opinion, seventy years is the ideal age for a man.

“Good husbands are unbearably boring, bad husbands are terribly presumptuous.

All men are monsters. The only thing left for women is to feed them better.

- The surest consolation is to beat off a suitor from another when you lose yours. In high society, this always rehabilitates a woman.

- To win a man, it is enough for a woman to awaken the worst that is in him. You make a god out of a man and he leaves you. The other makes a beast out of him, and he licks her hands and keeps up with her.

“It's just a disgrace how many women in London flirt with their own husbands. It's very disgusting. It's like washing clean linen in public.

I love eavesdropping through keyholes. You learn so many interesting things.
“Don’t you think it means to tempt providence?”
“Ah, he's been tempted so many times already. It's probably used to it.

- Not love at first sight, but love at the end of the season - it's much more reliable.

“I am unchanging in everything except my feelings.

This uncertainty is terrible. It wouldn't have ended any longer.

Margaret is very much prettier. The last time I saw her, twenty years ago, she was a freak in diapers.

- The former respect for youth quickly dies. I lost any influence on my mother already at the age of three.

“I believe that if a mother does not part with at least one daughter every season, then she does not have a heart.

“This governess is too beautiful to be kept in a decent house.

- No, I'm not cynical, I just have experience - however, this is one and the same.

- I like listening to myself. For me, this is one of the greatest pleasures. Sometimes I have very long conversations with myself, and, to be honest, I am so educated and smart that sometimes I do not understand a single word of what I say.

I don't go anywhere without a diary. On the train, you should always have something exciting to read.

- To be natural is a very difficult pose - you can’t stand it for a long time!

- I don’t order orchids, it’s beyond my means, but I don’t spare money on foreigners - they give the living room such a picturesque look!

“The ideal man should speak to us like goddesses and treat us like children.
He must refuse us all serious requests and indulge our every whim.
He must always say things that are not what he thinks, and think things that are not what he says.
He must not neglect other pretty women. This would prove that he has no taste, or raise the suspicion that he has too much taste.
He must always praise us for the qualities we do not have.
But he must be merciless, absolutely merciless, blaming us for such virtues that we never even dreamed of.
He must not believe that we need anything useful. It would be unforgivable. But he should shower us with everything that we do not need at all.
He must constantly compromise us in public and be extremely respectful with us in private.
And the reward for all this will be for him the opportunity to endlessly hope.

- In my opinion, a man is not capable of development. He has already reached the highest point - and it is not God knows how high.

About money

Today's young people imagine that money is everything. And over the years, they are convinced of this.

Without being rich, there is absolutely no need to be a nice person. Novels are the privilege of the rich, but by no means the profession of the poor. The poor must be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a regular annual income than to be a charming young man.

In our society, the only class thinks about money more than the rich: the poor. The poor can think of nothing but money.

A loan is the only capital of the youngest son in the family, and you can live well on this capital.

I don't need money - those who have a habit of paying debts need it, and I never pay my creditors.

Those gold-rimmed cigarettes are awfully expensive. I only smoke them when I'm deep in debt.

Time is a waste of money.

No one is rich enough to buy back their own past.

I knew a young man who was ruined by the habit of answering all letters.

About family and relatives

Relatives are the most boring people, they have no idea how to live, and they can’t guess when they should die.

I confess I really can't stand my kindred. It must be because we can't stand people with the same flaws that we have.

Actually, this is the scourge of God, but they give a person a certain weight.

I assure you that a typewriter, if played with feeling, is no more boring than a piano, at which a sister or some other relative sits.

After a good dinner, you will forgive everyone, even your own brother.

Genealogist: A person who traces your family tree as far back as you can afford.

Losing one of the others can be seen as a misfortune, but losing both is like negligence.

Children begin by loving their parents. Then they judge them. And almost never forgive them.

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

In America, young people spare no effort in educating their parents, trying to ensure that, even in their old age, they receive the necessary ideas about modern life.

No American child, no matter how much he loves his parents, will ever turn a blind eye to their shortcomings. However, this system of education, with all its advantages, does not always work. In many cases, children, no doubt, are dealing with ungrateful material, incapable of genuine development; this is evidenced by the fact that the American mother is still a tiresome person.

Fathers should not be seen or heard. Only on this basis can a strong family be built.

About life

Life is just a bad quarter of an hour of wonderful seconds.

Life is the best theater, but it's a pity, the repertoire is very bad.

Life is the rarest thing in the world. Most people only know existence.

Life is too important a thing to be taken seriously.

Life is never fair. For most of us, it's probably better that way.

There is nothing complicated in life. We are complex. Life is a simple thing, and what is simpler in it is more correct.

Life gives a person at best one single unique moment, and the secret of happiness is to repeat this moment as often as possible.

There is no secret to life. The purpose of life, if there is one, is to always look for temptations. There are very few of them. Sometimes a whole day goes by and not a single one is seen.

Man's first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. The second duty of man has not yet been discovered by anyone.

Everyone calls experience their own mistakes.

People always laugh at their tragedies - that's the only way to endure them.

Find words for your sadness and you will love it.

A well-tied tie is the first important step in life.

You should never take sides. This is the beginning of sincerity, followed by seriousness, and the whole human life turns into sheer boredom.

They lead a simple, healthy village life: they get up early because they have a lot to do, and they go to bed early because they have nothing to think about.

In major troubles, I deny myself everything except food and drink.

I always surprise myself. It's the only thing worth living for.

The purpose of life is self-expression. The highest duty is a duty to oneself.

Only two tragedies are possible in our life. One is when you don't get what you want, the other is when you get. The second is worse, it is truly a tragedy!

“Life is not a game. Life is a mystery. Her ideal is love. Her cleansing is a sacrifice.
- God forbid to be sacrificed!

These days most people die of a creeping form of slavish prudence, and everyone realizes too late that the only thing you will never regret is our mistakes and delusions.

Life imitates much more than Art imitates Life.

Life is depressingly shapeless. She orchestrates her catastrophes in the wrong people and in the wrong ways. Her comedies are characterized by grotesque horror, and her tragedies are resolved by farce.

The art of living is the only fine art created by our generation.

Most people fail because they invest too much in the prose of life. Going broke on poetry is at least an honor.

Whoever approaches life as an artist, the brain replaces the soul.

When you look back at life so trembling, so full of experiences, filled with moments of such hot frenzy and joys, it all seems like some kind of dream or dream. What is the unreal, if not those passions that once burned like fire? What is incredible, if not something that you once ardently believed in? What is the impossible? What he once did.

A person must absorb the colors of life, but never remember the details. The details are always banal.

The true secret of life lies in the visible, and not in the hidden.

Accidental lighting of objects in the room, the tone of the morning sky, a smell that you once loved and brought back vague memories, a line of a forgotten poem that you met again in a book, a musical phrase from a play that you have not played for a long time - these are the little things that depend on the course of our lives.

There are no omens. Nature does not send messengers to us - for this she is too wise or too ruthless.

About youth and old age

Youth is not fashion. Youth is art.

How stupid it is to speak of "inexperienced and ignorant youth." I respectfully listen to the opinions of only those who are much younger than me. ahead of us, life reveals its newest wonders to her.

A necessary condition for perfection is laziness; the goal of perfection is youth.

A disgusting, unhealthy habit of telling the truth, checking everything you hear for truth, without hesitation to object to people who are much younger.

With today's youth, there is simply no sweetness. No respect for dyed hair.

The secret to staying young is to avoid ugly emotions.

Old people believe everything, people of mature age doubt everything, young people know everything.

The young man wants to be faithful, but does not; the old man would like to change, but he cannot.

Youth has a whole kingdom ahead of it. Each of us will be born a king, and many, like kings, die in exile.

The tragedy of old age is not that a person grows old, but that he remains young in soul.

As soon as a person lives to such an age when it is necessary to understand, he ceases to understand anything.

To regain youth, one has only to repeat all its follies.

To regain my youth, I am ready to do everything - just not to get up early, not to do gymnastics and not to be a useful member of society.

About education

Education is a wonderful thing, you just need to remember at least sometimes that nothing worth knowing can be taught.

The thirst for knowledge is the fruit of long years of study.

Society produces rogues, and education makes some rogues smarter than others.

The three letters you wrote to me after we broke up are so good and have so many spelling mistakes that I still can't help crying when I reread them.

A highly educated, knowledgeable person is the modern ideal. And the brain of such a highly educated person is something terrible! It is like an antiques shop full of all sorts of dusty junk, where every thing is valued much higher than its true value.

A well-educated person contradicts others, a wise person contradicts himself.

All who were decidedly incapable of learning anything began to teach - this is what crowned our passion for education.

People teach to hide their ignorance, just as they smile to hide their tears.

He who is so preoccupied with the enlightenment of others will never make time for his own enlightenment. The true ideal for man is the growth of his own culture.

God bless you to be close to a man who spent his whole life striving to educate others. How narrow is the horizon of these people! How tired they are of us, and, no doubt, of themselves, endlessly repeating and chewing on the same thoughts!

In examinations, fools ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

Exams mean absolutely nothing. If you are a gentleman, then you know as much as you need, and if you are not a gentleman, then any knowledge only harms you.

About conversation, education, etiquette

Do you always understand what you say?
Yes, if I listen carefully.

I like to talk about nothing. It's the only one I know anything about.

- Only you alone and talked all the time without closing your mouth.
“Someone has to listen, but I like to talk myself. This saves time and prevents disagreements.

In a conversation, you should touch everything, not focusing on anything.

To gain a reputation as a brilliantly educated person, you need to talk to every woman as if you are in love with her, and to every man as if you are bored next to him.

Just don't be in a hurry to agree with me. When they agree with me, I always have the feeling that I messed up somewhere.

Listening is very dangerous: you can be persuaded. And a person who yields to the arguments of reason is a very unreasonable being.

I don't believe a single word you tell me... or I tell you.

I usually say what's on my mind. This is a big mistake these days: you are too often misunderstood.

Nowadays, to be understood means to get into trouble.

I live in constant fear of being misunderstood.

If you tell the truth, you'll get caught sooner or later anyway.

To tell a person the whole truth, sometimes more than a duty, is a pleasure.

Giving advice is always a mistake, but good advice will never be forgiven.

To tell is to relive. Actions are the first tragedy of life, words are the second. And the words are perhaps worse. Words hurt.

Learned conversation is the occupation of the mentally unemployed.

Like all speakers who make it their goal to exhaust a subject, he exhausted the patience of his listeners.

I love to hear people gossip about others, but not about me - the latter does not have the charm of novelty.

At the heart of every gossip lies a well-tested immorality.

Backbiting is gossip with a boring tinge of morality.

It's downright monstrous how people are behaving these days: behind your back they are telling the honest truth about you.

I don't want to know what they say about me behind my back. This flatters me too much.

It's always nice not to go where you're expected.

Now a good upbringing is just a hindrance. It closes many doors for you.

Being natural is a pose, and the most hated pose for people!

To be natural, you must be able to pretend.

Sincerity in small doses is dangerous, but in large doses it is deadly.

Vulgarity is simply the behavior of other people. Others are generally a nightmare audience. The only good company is yourself.

A gentleman is a person who never offends his neighbor without intention.

I'm always very friendly to those I don't care about.

Dinner at half past seven! So early! Yes, it's like stooping down to reading an English novel. No decent person eats dinner before seven.

When a person comes to visit, he spends the time of the hosts, not his own.

About society

Being in society is just boring. And being out of society is already a tragedy.

People who belong to good society are interesting only for the masks that each of them wears, and not for what is hidden behind these masks.

Great ball! That's how I remember the old days. And fools in society has not diminished. It's nice to see that everything is the same here.

Light was created by fools so that smart people can live in it.

In a tailcoat and white tie, anyone, even a stockbroker, can pass for a cultured person.

The man who can master the conversation at a London dinner can master the whole world. The future belongs to the dandy.

I love dinner parties in London. Smart people simply do not listen to what they are told, and stupid people do not speak at all.

In Paris, such stories make a person famous, but in London people still have so many prejudices. This is not the place to start your story with a scandal. Scandals are saved for old age, when you need to stir up interest in yourself.

There are only five women in all of London worth talking to, and even then two of those five have no place in polite society.

Everything can be experienced except death; everything can be transferred, except for a good reputation.

All good hats are created out of thin air - as are all good reputations.

He must be a very respectable man. I never heard his name in my life, and that means a lot these days.

Choose your enemies carefully.

I choose beautiful people as close friends, people with a good reputation as friends, and I only make smart enemies.

He has no enemies - he is not such an outstanding person.

All sympathize with the misfortunes of their friends, and few rejoice in their successes.

Do you know him? I know him so well that I haven't spoken to him in ten years.

I like to know everything about my new acquaintances and nothing about old ones.

I would never have become his friend if I had known him. It is very dangerous to know your own friends well.

Controversy is an extremely vulgar thing. In a good society, everyone has exactly the same opinion.

Anyone who happened to live among the poor will confirm that the brotherhood of man is not an empty fiction of poets, but the most oppressive and vile reality; and if a writer necessarily seeks to know the mores of high society, he might as well comprehend them by portraying matchmakers or fruit peddlers.

If the lower classes will not set an example for us, what good will they do?

Labor is the curse of the drinking class.

I deeply sympathize with the British democrats who are indignant at the so-called "vices of the upper classes". People of the lower class instinctively understand that drunkenness, stupidity and immorality should be their privileges, and if any of us suffers from these vices, he thereby, as it were, usurps their rights.

About politics

I love political salons. This is the only place where they don't talk about politics.

There is hardly a single person in the House of Commons on whom an artist would be worth spending paint on. True, many of them need whitewashing.

In our time, nothing makes such a favorable impression on the listeners as a good, completely worn common place. Everyone suddenly feels a kind of kinship of souls.

Members of the House of Commons have nothing to say, which is what they are talking about.

Democracy is nothing more than the intimidation of the crowd by the crowd in the interests of the crowd.

Solid government is an empty hope for those who do not understand how difficult the art of government is.

Anyone who wants to lead the people behind him is forced to follow the crowd.

Progress is the realization of Utopias.

To make a man a socialist is a trifle, but to make socialism humane is a great thing.

The value of an idea has nothing to do with the sincerity of its herald.

The most unforgivable thing about a fanatic is his sincerity.

In our age, the world is ruled by individuals, not ideas.

It is impossible to bring people to virtue by legislative means - and this is already good.

Society incomparably runs wilder from the systematic use of punitive measures than from episodically committed crimes.

Society often forgives a criminal, never a dreamer.

The less punishment, the less crime.

About England, America ... and other countries

America was discovered many times before Columbus, but no one was told about it.

I would say that America is not open at all. She has just been discovered.

The American is the Don Quixote of common sense, for he is practical to such an extent that he is completely out of touch with reality.

Stupid Americans do not exist in nature. There is no fool in America. Even from a shoe shiner, the Americans demand intelligence, and in this they have succeeded.

America's youth is the oldest of its traditions. She is already three hundred years old.

It is said that in America the export of pork is the most profitable business. Only politics is more profitable than him.

In America, the president rules for four years, and journalists indefinitely.

The cult of heroes in America is unusually developed, and heroes are always chosen among criminals.

In the Southern states, nostalgia for the times before the Civil War is strong. “What a beautiful moon today!” I remarked to the gentleman standing next to me. “Yes,” he replied, “but if you had seen her before the war…”

America's crude mercenary spirit, its indifference to the poetic side of being, is all entirely the result of the fact that the country recognized as its national hero a man who, by his own admission, was incapable of lying.

An American judges beauty by mass, superiority is determined by size.

Our country is the largest in the world. Some of our states are as big as England and France put together.
“I can imagine what kind of drafts you have there.

“There is a saying that good Americans go to Paris when they die.
– That's how! And where do bad Americans go after death?
- In America.

The American managed to turn his country into a paradise for women. Here, perhaps, lies the reason why American women, like Eve, are so eager to leave this paradise.

All American women dress well. They order their toilets in Paris.

American women get tired of long races, but they are great in steeplechase.

Like most American women, she poses as a beauty. This is the secret of her success.

All American girls have an exceptional charm, the secret of which is their inability to talk seriously with anyone except their hairdresser, and think seriously about anything but entertainment.

The main disadvantage of American girls is their mothers.

Having understood from the example of her mother that American women do not know how to age beautifully, the American girl prefers not to do this at all, and often succeeds here.

We, the British, now really have everything in common with the Americans, except, of course, the language.

England is the birthplace of hypocrites.

The English have the magical gift of turning wine into water.

In England, if a man cannot speak at least twice a week about morality before a large and quite immoral audience, the political field is closed to him. In the sense of the profession, he is left with only botany or the church.

There is something tragic about the fact that there are so many young people in England at the present time who start life with a fine profile and end up in some useful profession.

The ability to think is the most unhealthy thing under the sun, and people die from it in the same way as from physical ailments. Fortunately, in England this ability is not contagious.

England will not become civilized until the list of her colonies is replenished with Utopia. It would be much more profitable to exchange some of the territories subject to it for this country. We need people who are impractical and able to look beyond the present and reflect on what is not limited to today.

In England we have wonderful poetry, because the public does not read it, and therefore does not influence it in any way.

He had a typical British face. Such a face, once you see it, you will not remember it.

There are twenty-five recipes for cooking potatoes and three hundred and sixty-five recipes for boiling eggs, but the British cook still knows only three ways to serve one or the other.

There is too much fog and serious people in London. Whether the fog gives rise to serious people, or vice versa, I don’t know.

London fogs didn't exist until art invented them.

I would not like to change anything in England, except the weather.

The great advantage of France over England is that in France every bourgeois wants to be an artist, while in England every artist wants to be a bourgeois.

The Japanese are the creation of certain artists. To be honest, the whole of Japan is a complete fiction. There is no such country as such a people. If you want to experience a specifically Japanese effect, you should not be like a tourist and take a ticket to Tokyo. On the contrary, you should stay at home, immersed in the study of the work of several Japanese artists, and when you deeply feel their style, understand what is the peculiarity of their figurative perception, one day at noon go sit in the park or wander around Piccadilly - if you don’t succeed to recognize something purely Japanese there means you will not recognize it anywhere in the world.

Nothing is impossible in Russia except reforms.

About literature and journalism

In the old days, books were written by writers and read by readers. Now books are written by readers and no one reads them.

Any rules about what should and what should not be read are simply ridiculous. Modern culture is more than half based on what not to read.

We write so much that we don't have time to think.

Anyone can write a three-volume novel. All that is needed for this is to have absolutely no knowledge of either life or literature.

... Novels so similar to life that absolutely no one will believe in the likelihood of what is being told.

The ancient historians present us with delightful fiction in the form of facts; the modern novelist presents us with boring facts under the guise of fiction.

Only the great masters of style manage to be unreadable.

Literature cannot adequately express life. But a work of art quite adequately expresses Art, and nothing more is needed. Life is only a motif of an ornament.

In fact, it is no easier to describe a prison artistically than, say, a latrine. Taking up the description of the latter in verse or prose, we can only say whether there is paper there or not, whether it is clean or dirty - that's all; The horror of the prison lies in the fact that, being in itself extremely primitive and banal, it acts so destructively on a person.

Only characters who never really existed are truly real; and if the novelist is so helpless as to look for his characters in the midst of life, let him at least pretend to have invented them himself, and not boast of resemblance to authentic models.

The nihilist, that wondrous martyr without faith, is a purely literary product. It was invented by Turgenev and completed by Dostoevsky.

The nineteenth century as we know it was invented by Balzac. We are simply fulfilling, with notes and unnecessary additions, the caprice or fantasy of the creative mind of the great novelist.

About Charles Dickens' The Antiquities Store:
You need to have a heart of stone not to laugh when reading about the death of little Nell.

If the spirit that permeates the novels of George Sand is antediluvian, it is only because the flood has not yet arrived; if it is utopian, then Utopia will have to be added to the geographical realities.

Current novels are so similar to life that there is no way to believe in their plausibility.

Characters are needed in a novel not to see people for who they are, but to get to know an author who is unlike anyone else.

Pessimism was invented by Hamlet. The whole world has become sad because a stage character once experienced sadness.

About one of the English novelists:
He writes at the top of his voice. It is so loud that no one can hear it.

How much writers have lost by starting to write. They need to start talking again.

Parody requires lightness, imagination and, oddly enough, love for the poet being parodied. He can be parodied only by his students - and no one else.

I know how fun it is to pick up some nickname and wear it like a rose in a buttonhole. This is how all the major schools of art acquired their names.

All bad poetry is born of sincere feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be unartistic.

There seems to be some strange connection between piety and bad rhymes.

Poets know perfectly well that it is profitable to write about love, it is in great demand. In our time, a broken heart withstands many editions.

Love went out of fashion, it was killed by the poets. They wrote so much about her that everyone stopped believing them.

If a person has released a collection of bad sonnets, you can say in advance that he is completely irresistible. He brings into his life the poetry that he is not able to bring into his poems. But other kinds of poets pour out poetry on paper that they don't have the courage to put into practice.

It sometimes seems to me that Homer's blindness is actually an artistic myth, created in the time of true criticism in order to remind us not only that a great poet is always a seer, comprehending the world not with physical, but with spiritual vision, but also that he is a real singer, whose song is born from music, when, repeating every line to himself over and over again, he grasps the secret of its melody and in the darkness finds words surrounded by light.

Charles Lam says that the merits of poetry are always doubtful to him until they are printed; in his remarkable judgment, "the typographer takes care of all questions."

A poet can endure anything but a typo.

There are no born liars and poets.

The foundation of literary friendship is the exchange of poisoned glasses.

What is the difference between journalism and literature? Journalism is not worth reading, and literature is not read.

In our age, newspapers try to make the public judge a sculptor not by his sculptures, but by how he treats his wife; about an artist by the size of his income, and about a poet by the color of his tie.

Journalism is organized slander.

Today's journalists always face to face ask a person for forgiveness for what they said about him publicly.

Do you really believe everything that is written in the newspapers?
- I believe. The only thing that happens these days is the unbelievable.

- I read all the English newspapers. They are very interesting.
Well, then you read between the lines.

In its defense, journalism can refer to the great Darwinian law of the survival of the mediocre.

Much can be said in defense of modern journalism. By giving a voice to uneducated people, it introduces us to social ignorance.

Spies are a dying profession. For them now all do newspapers.

About theater, music and painting

I love the stage, everything on it is much more true than in life.

Sometimes the least pleasure in the theater comes from the play. More than once I saw an audience that was more interesting than the actors, and heard dialogue in the foyer that surpassed what I heard from the stage.

The public looks at the tragic, but the comedian looks at the public.

The true playwright shows us life through art, not art in the form of life.

If a play is a work of art, its staging in the theater is not a test for the play, but for the theater; if it is not a work of art, its production in the theater is not a test for the play, but for the public.

Sometimes they say that actors show us their Hamlets instead of Shakespeare's. And in fact there is no Shakespearean Hamlet. If there is certainty in Hamlet, as in a work of art, there is also incomprehensibility in him, as in any phenomenon of life. There are as many Hamlets as there are types of melancholy.

Until an actor feels at home in a suit, he does not feel at home in his role.

Tragic effects can be achieved by bringing in the comic. Laughter in the hall does not eliminate the feeling of horror, but, by giving an outlet, it helps to deepen it. Never be afraid to cause laughter in the audience. By doing this, you will not spoil, but, on the contrary, strengthen the tragedy.

Any extremely intense emotion tends to be discharged with the help of some emotion of the opposite nature. Hysterical laughter and tears of joy are examples of the dramatic effect that nature itself provides.

If an ancient Greek were resurrected today, he would be more often seen in the circus than in the theater.

Music is that kind of art in which form and content are one.

What a blessing that we have at least one inimitable art!

If we want to understand a people in terms of the art they have created, it is better to turn to architecture or music. The spirit of an epoch is best conveyed by the abstract arts, since the spirit itself is an abstract and ideal concept.

Of course, there are many difficulties with music. If the music is good, no one listens to it, and if it's bad, it's impossible to have a conversation.

I prefer Wagner's music to any other. It is so noisy, you can chat to it in the theater all evening without fear that strangers will hear you.

The music will be in German, you won't understand.

Musicians are such an unintelligent people. They want us to be mute, just when we most want to be deaf.

After Chopin, I feel as if I have just wept over mistakes and sins of which I am innocent, and tragedies that have nothing to do with me.

The actor is the critic of the drama. A music critic is a singer, or a violinist, or a flutist.

I really adore pianists. I don’t know what attracts me so much in them… Maybe it’s because they are foreigners. After all, they seem to be all foreigners? Even those born in England eventually become foreigners. This is very sensible of them and gives a good reputation to their art, makes it cosmopolitan.

In America, in the Rocky Mountains, I saw the only reasonable method of art criticism. There was a sign above the piano in the bar:

"Don't shoot the pianist - he's doing his best."

The picture carries no more message or meaning to us than a wonderful piece of Venetian glass or a blue tile from a Damascus wall: it is only a beautifully painted surface.

Art should not be taught at the Academy. An artist creates what he sees, not what he hears.

... Academician artists, whose complete inability to paint we can see every year in May for a shilling.

... That curious mixture of bad work and good intentions, which gives us the right to consider the artist as a typical representative of English art.

Most of our modern portrait painters are destined to complete oblivion. They never convey what they see. They convey what the public sees, and the public sees absolutely nothing.

You can trust only those portraits in which the model is almost invisible, but the artist is very clearly visible.

Any portrait painted with love is, in essence, a portrait of the artist himself, and not of the one who posed for him. Not him, but himself, the artist reveals on the canvas.

Neither Gothic nor Antiquity knows poses at all. The pose was invented by mediocre portrait painters, and the first of the people who began to pose was a stockbroker, who has been posing non-stop ever since.

The only people with whom an artist should make acquaintance are beautiful and stupid people, people whom it is an artistic pleasure to look at and talk to which is a rest for the mind.

About art

Only art has a soul, but a person does not have it.

Art is the only serious thing in the world, but an artist is the only person in the world who is never serious.

Art expresses nothing but itself.

You can forgive a person who does something useful, as long as he does not admire it. To the one who creates the useless, the only justification is only passionate love for his creation.
All art is completely useless.

Art is more of a veil than a mirror.

Art creates great archetypes, in relation to which everything that exists is only an unfinished copy.

If nature is matter striving to become soul, then art is soul expressing itself in material things.

Art is our spiritual protest, our gallant attempt to show nature its true place.

A thing that exists in nature becomes much more beautiful if it resembles an object of art, but an object of art does not truly become beautiful from the resemblance to a thing that exists in nature.

The concept of "art for art's sake" does not imply an end goal, but only a formula for creativity.

Art is created for life, not life for art.

Life is the best, it is the only student of art.

Life moves faster than Realism, but Romanticism always stays ahead of Life.

In fact, art does not reflect life, but the viewer.

It would be a mistake to think that the passion experienced during creativity can find its full expression in the created work. Art is much more abstract than we think. Form and colors tell us about form and colors, and nothing more.

Art moves forward exclusively along the route laid out by itself. It is not the expression of any age. On the contrary, the age itself is the expression of art.

Only the modern is destined to become old-fashioned.

Art does not affect human activity - on the contrary, it paralyzes the desire to act.

In art, as in politics, grandfathers are always wrong.

Of all the artists I knew, only the mediocre ones were charming people. Talented people live by their creativity and therefore are completely uninteresting in themselves. A great poet - a truly great one - is always the most prosaic person. And the secondary ones are charming.

Artists have gender, but art itself has no gender.

I have always believed and still believe that selfishness is the alpha and omega of modern art, but to be selfish, one must have an ego. By no means to anyone who shouts loudly: “I! Me!", allowed to enter the Realm of Art.

Art without individuality is impossible. Although at the same time its purpose is not in the expression of individuality. It exists to please.

Everyone should be a work of art - or wear a work of art.

The best school for studying art is art itself, not life.

The world is made by singers, and made for dreamers.

The artist does not seek to prove anything. You can prove anything, even undoubted truths.

Artists, like gods, should never leave their pedestals.

The purpose of art is to reveal beauty and hide the artist.

What is not in the creator cannot be in the creation.

The more art imitates an era, the less it conveys its spirit.

No great artist sees things as they really are.

Technique is really the personality of the artist. That is why the master is not able to teach it, and the apprentice is not able to adopt it, but the critical artist can understand it.

Eccentrics, right, these artists! They climb out of their skin to achieve fame, and when fame comes, they seem to be weighed down by it. How stupid! If it’s unpleasant when people talk about you a lot, then it’s even worse when they don’t talk about you at all.

We look at distant centuries through art, and art, fortunately, never conveys the truth.

The object of Art should not be simple reality, but complex beauty.

Only the gods tasted death. Apollo is dead, but Hyacinth, whom people say he killed, is still alive. Nero and Narcissus are always with us.

They try to appeal to the authority of Shakespeare - they always appeal to him - and they will quote that badly written place where it is said about the mirror that art holds before nature, forgetting that this unsuccessful aphorism is put, not without reason, into the mouth of Hamlet, so that those around him have an extra opportunity to see his complete madness when it comes to art.

The main purpose of nature, apparently, is to illustrate the lines of poets.

Art creates its incomparable single effect, and having achieved it, it moves on to another. And nature repeats everything and repeats this effect until everyone gets tired of it to the limit. Today, let's say, no one endowed with even the rudiments of culture will talk about the beauty of sunsets. Sunsets have become quite old-fashioned. They were good at a time when Turner was the last word in painting. Last night Mrs. Arundel urged me to look out the window at the dazzling beauty of the sky, as she put it. And what did I see? Just a second-rate Turner, and all his worst flaws were bulged and emphasized beyond measure.

When art becomes more varied, nature will no doubt also become less tediously uniform.

Nature imitates art. It is able to demonstrate only those effects that are already familiar to us through poetry or painting. This is the secret of the charm of nature, as well as the secret of its flaws.

A well-chosen boutonniere is the only link between Art and Nature.

Art should never be in the public domain. The public should strive to cultivate artistry in itself.

The audience is surprisingly tolerant. She will forgive you everything except genius.

The public is filled with an insatiable curiosity about anything but what is worthy of attention.

Looking at something is not the same as seeing. You see nothing until you learn to see beauty.

Beauty has as many meanings as a person has moods. Beauty is a symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything to us because it expresses nothing.

Everything beautiful belongs to the same era.

Only that which has nothing to do with us is beautiful. Hecuba is nothing to us, and that is precisely why her sorrows are such grateful material for tragedy.

I would like to remind those who scoff at beauty as something impractical, that an ugly thing is just a poorly done thing. There is divine economy in beauty, it gives us only what we need; ugliness is wasteful, it wastes material, ugliness in costume and in everything else is always a sign that someone was impractical.

Beauty is the highest revelation because it expresses nothing.

The ethics of art is in the perfect application of imperfect means.

There was no creative era, which at the same time would not become an era of criticism. For nothing but the critical faculty creates fresh forms.

I would call criticism creativity within creativity.

For true interpretation, one's own personality is absolutely necessary.

The true critic does not address the artist, but only the public. He works for her.

The critic is meant to enlighten the reader; the artist is called upon to enlighten criticism.

The aim of the critic is to capture his own impressions. It is for him that paintings are created, books are written and marble is turned into sculpture.

Criticism requires much more culture than creativity.

It is only because a person himself cannot create anything that he can become a worthy judge of what has been created by others.

I do not agree with everything that I have stated in this essay. There are many things I strongly disagree with. An essay simply develops a certain artistic point of view, and in art criticism, position is everything. Because there is no universal truth in art. Truth in art is Truth, the opposite of which is also true.

How much does a theme mean to an artist as creative as the critic? No less, but no more than it means to a novelist or a painter. He is similar to them in that he knows how to find his motives everywhere.

Creativity always trails behind its age. And Criticism guides this age. The Spirit of Criticism and the Universal Spirit are unity.

Creativity narrows the limits of vision, while contemplation expands them.

Only the auctioneer is able to equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

There are two ways to dislike art. One of them is to simply not love him. The other is to love him rationally.

Poor reviewers find themselves in the position of reporters at the police station, located in the camp of literature, and are forced to inform recidivists from art about new crimes.

In the books of the public series it is customary to express public views, and cheap criticism is excusable in cheap editions.

Judging by their appearance, most critics are sold for a low price.

Caricature is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius.

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In the novel, they are disgusting.

Perhaps a more accurate description of what never happened is the historian's inalienable privilege and specialty.

Centuries live in history thanks to their anachronisms.

About Herodotus, the "father of history":
Herodotus, despite the petty and low encroachments of modern pedants who seek confirmation of the facts set forth in his history, can rightly be called the Father of Lies.

Carlyle's The French Revolution is one of the most charming historical novels ever written.

All you do is turn history upside down.
This is our only obligation to history.

By no means does art reproduce its age. The great mistake of all historians is that they judge the epoch itself by the art of the epoch.

Even the most noble men are extremely subject to female charms. Modern history, like ancient history, provides many deplorable examples of this. If it were otherwise, the story would be impossible to read.

All great personalities are sooner or later doomed to be at the level of their biographers.

Everyone can make history, but only great people can write it.

Today, every great man has disciples, and his biography is usually written by Judas.

Modern memoirs are usually written by people who have completely lost their memory and have done nothing worthy of being written down.

If the cavemen could, history would have taken a different path.

About truth

The road to truth is paved with paradoxes. To comprehend Reality, one must see how it balances on a tightrope.

Truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Truth is completely and absolutely created by style.

Language is not the son, but the father of thought.

Truth never depends on facts, selecting and creating them at its own discretion.

I can still put up with brute force, but brute, dull rationality is absolutely unbearable. To be guided by reason - there is something ignoble in this. It means to betray the intellect.

"Are you absolutely sure of that?"
- Absolutely sure.
Well, in that case, it's just an illusion. Just what you firmly believe in does not really exist. Such is the fatal fate of faith, and love teaches us the same thing.

How easy it is to convert others and how difficult it is to convert yourself.

Truth ceases to be truth as soon as more than one person believes in it.

Faith does not become truth just because someone dies for it.

Every thought is immoral. Its essence is destruction. Nothing can bear the impact of thought.

We express a really impartial opinion only about what is of no interest to us, and that is why an impartial opinion, in turn, is absolutely of no value.

A thought that cannot be called dangerous does not deserve the name of a thought at all.

A person least of all turns out to be himself when speaking about his own person. Let him put on his mask and you will hear the truth from him.

Only the most imperceptible people do not judge by appearance.

Lies are the truth of other people.

A person can believe in the impossible, but he will never believe in the improbable.

On Religion and Morality

Religion is a common surrogate for faith.

Religions die when the truth contained in them is proved. Science is the chronicle of dead religions.

Skepticism is the beginning of faith.

What is Truth? When it comes to religion, this is nothing more than a well-known opinion that has managed to hold out for centuries.

Holiness is created by love. Saints are people who have loved the most.

Christ died not to save people, but to teach them how to save one another.

Past, present and future are but a moment in the eyes of God, and we should try to live in front of him.

The paths of the gods are paved only by those whose judgments sound like the voice of a pilgrim in the desert.

Prayer must remain unanswered, otherwise it is no longer prayer, but correspondence.

Miracles! I do not believe in miracles. I've seen too many miracles.
Herodias in Wilde's Salome.

The truths of faith are not believed because they are reasonable, but because they are often repeated.

The Lord, creating man, somewhat overestimated his strength.

The only apostle who did not deserve to be presented with evidence of the existence of God was Saint Thomas, but he alone received them.

Atheism needs religion just as much as faith.

A bishop at eighty continues to repeat what he was told when he was an eighteen-year-old youth - it is natural that his face retains beauty and good looks.

Both the theory and practice of the church in the early centuries of Christianity spoke out against marriage. Therefore, the church of the first centuries of Christianity did not survive to our time.

As soon as the cannibals begin to threaten death from exhaustion, the Lord, in His infinite mercy, sends them a fat missionary.

Mercy breeds many sins.

Better a hundred unnatural sins than one unnatural virtue.

Better to be beautiful than virtuous. But, on the other hand, it is better to be virtuous than ugly.

An orchid as beautiful as the seven deadly sins.

The tragedy of the poor is that only self-denial is within their means. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.

Boredom is the only sin that cannot be forgiven.

Nothing flatters our pride more than the reputation of a sinner.

Not a sinner, but a fool - this is the greatest of our evils. There is no sin but stupidity.

Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.

Viciousness is a myth invented by virtuous people in order to explain the strange attractiveness of some people.

In the village, anyone can be righteous. There are no temptations there. Joining civilization is a very difficult task. There are two ways to do this: culture or the so-called depravity. And the villagers do not have access to both. Here they are stagnant in virtue.

Aesthetics is higher than ethics. It belongs to the realm of higher spirituality. In the development of a personality, even the sense of color acquired by it is more important than the acquired understanding of good and evil.

There are no books moral or immoral. There are books that are well written or poorly written. That's all.

Morality has always been the last refuge of people who are indifferent to art.

A man who reads morality is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who reads morality is certainly an ugly woman.

Indiscreet behavior is the easiest way to feign innocence.

Hypocrisy is an interesting subject for psychologists, and although moral posturing is the most disgusting of all types of posturing, the ability to stand in a pose is already worth something.

We ascribe to our neighbors those virtues from which we can profit ourselves, and imagine that we do this out of generosity.

There is nothing more distressing than to discover virtue in a person whom you would never suspect of it. It's like stumbling upon a needle in a haystack. This is a tunic. If you have a virtue, you should warn about it in advance.

It seems to me that good people do a lot of harm in life ... And the main harm is that they attach such great importance to the bad. It makes no sense to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or boring. I prefer charming.

I didn't become a spoiled person. Many even claim that I have never committed a single truly bad deed in my entire life. Of course, they only say this behind my back.

My evil qualities are simply monstrous. When I remember them at night, I immediately fall asleep again.

Do you really think that only weak people succumb to temptation? I assure you, there are such terrible temptations that in order to succumb to them, strength, strength and courage are needed.

The only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it.

I can resist anything but temptation.

Even the worst habits are hard to break. Perhaps the hardest thing is with the bad ones. They are such an essential part of our "I".

Intellectual abstractions are always interesting, but moral abstractions mean absolutely nothing.

"Conscience" is the official name for cowardice, that's all.

Conscience makes us all selfish.

Selfishness is not that a person lives as he wants, but that he makes others live according to his principles.

Thinking about yourself is not egoism. He who does not think of himself is not capable of thinking at all. But it is extremely selfish to demand from one's neighbor thoughts and judgments similar to one's own. For what? If he is able to think, most likely he thinks differently. If he is not capable, it is unacceptable to demand from him a glimpse of thought.

The main harm of marriage is that it corrodes selfishness from a person. And unselfish people are colorless, they lose their individuality.

Those who pretend to be good are taken seriously by the world. Those who pretend to be bad - no. Such is the boundless stupidity of the optimists.

The most absurd deeds a person always performs from the noblest motives.

To love everyone is to love no one.

Self-sacrifice is a remnant of the savage ritual of self-mutilation, a reminder of that worship of pain that has brought so much evil in history and now requires new victims every day, erecting its altars.

Self-sacrifice should be prohibited by law. It corrupts those to whom it is sacrificed. They always go astray.

Forgiving your enemies is the best way to piss them off.

A sense of duty is exactly what we want to see in others.

My duty is what I do not do out of principle.

Good intentions are checks that people write to a bank where they don't have a checking account.

Generosity is not contagious.

Philosophy teaches us to endure the misfortunes of others.

Philanthropists, carried away by charity, lose all philanthropy.

To have sympathy for the disadvantaged is much easier. It is much more difficult to have sympathy for a thought.

Don't talk to me about the suffering of the poor. They are inevitable. Speak of the suffering of geniuses and I will cry tears of blood.

There is something highly unhealthy in the universal sympathy for suffering. One must sympathize with the beauty, bright colors and joys of life. The nineteenth century went bankrupt because it was too generous with compassion.

To be a good person means to be in harmony with yourself. Discord is the need to be in harmony with others.

Every influence is harmful, but a beneficent influence is the worst thing in the world.

Every crime is vulgar, just as every vulgarity is a crime.

Murder is always a mistake. You should never do anything that you can't talk to people about after dinner.

Any trial is a trial on someone's life, and any sentence is a death sentence.

You can endure any adversity - they come from outside, they are accidental. But suffering for your own mistakes is the most bitter thing in life.

What is a cynic? A man who has a price for everything, but who does not know the value.

Worse than Injustice is only one thing - Justice, from whose hands the sword was taken. When Truth is not also Force, it is Evil.

As long as war is seen as evil, it will always have a certain attraction. When you learn to see vulgarity in it, it will not attract anyone.

About people and man

The only thing we know for sure about human nature is that it changes. Variability is its only predictable property.

It is humiliating to realize that we are all molded from the same dough, but where can we get away from this? There is something of Hamlet in Falstaff, and there is a lot of Falstaff in Hamlet.

The whole world is a theater, but the troupe is no good.

Mankind exaggerates its role on earth. This is his original sin.

The chosen ones exist to do nothing. Action is both limited and relative. Boundless and absolute are the visions of one who is inactive and observant, who is dreamy and lonely.

Acting, a person is likened to a puppet. Describing, he becomes a poet.

Only people of action have more illusions than dreamers. They have no idea why they do something, or what will come of it.

Discontent is the first step towards progress both in the individual and in the nation.

We all wallow in the mud, but some of us look at the stars.

In this age people read too much to be wise and think too much to be beautiful.

The greatest events in the world are those that take place in the human brain.

True perfection lies not in what a person has, but in what he is.

The true personality should not be consonant with rebellion, it is consonant with peace.

When a person is happy, he is always good. But good people are not always happy.

We are all ready to believe in others for the simple reason that we are afraid for ourselves. Optimism is based on pure fear.

All charming people are spoiled. This is the secret of their attractiveness.

People interest me more than their principles, and the most interesting thing is people without principles.

Cheap editions of great books are always welcome, but cheap versions of great people are worthy of contempt.

Only two kinds of people are truly interesting - those who know absolutely everything about life, and those who know nothing about it.

Most people are keenly interested in everything in the world, except for what is really worth knowing.

People have become so industrious that they have become immeasurably stupid.

It is those passions, the nature of which we misunderstand, that dominate us the most. And the weakest of all are feelings, the origin of which we understand.

Mirrors reflect only masks.

The mask tells us more than the face.

People's feelings are much more interesting than their thoughts.

He who sees any difference between soul and body has neither.

Imagination is given to a person to console him with what he does not have, and a sense of humor is given to console him with what he has.

Consistency is the last resort of unimaginative people.

Moderation is a fatal quality. Only extremes lead to success.

Ambition is the last refuge of a loser.

Seriousness is the last refuge of mediocrity.

I love simple pleasures. This is the last refuge of complex natures.

A sensitive person is one who will certainly crush the calluses of others if he himself suffers from them.

The pessimist, faced with a choice between two types of evil, chooses both.

Other people's dramas are always unbearably banal.

None of us would have tolerated others' mistakes like ours.

“There is one thing about you that I always like.
- Only one? And I have so many shortcomings.

He is one of those extremely weak-willed natures that are not amenable to any influence.

He died. Apparently, he attached too much importance to the diagnosis of his doctors.

If you want to understand others, take a closer look at yourself.

In order to understand at least partly oneself, one must understand everything about others.

I am the only person in the world that I would like to know better.

Only shallow people know themselves.

I do not believe in progress, but I believe in the permanence of human stupidity.

About Miscellaneous

In the temple, everyone should be serious, except for the one who is worshiped.

In all trifling matters, style is important, not sincerity. In all serious matters - too.

You should always play fair if you have all the cards in your hands.

Actions are the last refuge of people who cannot dream.

There are only two phenomena that in our nineteenth century still remain inexplicable and unjustified: death and vulgarity.

Everyone should go to a palmist at least once a month to know what he can and cannot do. Then, of course, we do the opposite, but it's nice to know about the consequences in advance!

Fashion is such an unbearable kind of ugliness that you have to change it every six months.

What you wear is fashionable, what others wear is unfashionable.

You can admire a foreign language, even if you can not speak it fluently, how can you love a woman, hardly knowing her.

We live in an age where only useless things are needed.

I hate it when people don't take food seriously. These are unfounded people, and, moreover, vulgar.

There are no tactless questions, only tactless answers.

There is nothing more dangerous than being fashionable. Everything fashionable quickly goes out of fashion.

None of the mistakes do not cost us as cheaply as the prophecy.

Doing nothing is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most spiritual.

I have the best opinion about football. Great game for rough girls, but not for delicate boys.

To define means to limit.

Cigarettes are the most perfect kind of supreme pleasure, subtle and sharp, but leaving us unsatisfied. What more could you want?

Nature is by no means the mother who nurtured us. She is our creation.

Nature hates reason.

Punctuality is a time thief.

Work is the last refuge of those who can't do anything else.

It is worth doing only what is considered impossible.

Those who look at things from both sides usually see neither.

It's hard to avoid the future.

It's none of my business. That is why it interests me. My affairs always make me sad. I prefer others.

It's terribly hard work doing nothing.

I always do this with good advice: I pass it on to others. There is nothing else to do with them.

I don't like principles. I prefer prejudice.

I hate fights, no matter the reason. They are always vulgar and often conclusive.

From Wilde's letter to Ada Leverson:
I read to Alfred passages from his own life. It was a surprise for him. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I hope you will guide mine.

Oscar Wilde on others

About Shakespeare:
City life educates and perfects everything that is most civilized in man. Shakespeare wrote nothing but bad pamphlets until he came to London, and he never wrote a line when he left London forever.

The more objective a work seems to us, the more subjective it is in fact. Perhaps Shakespeare did meet Rosencrantz and Gil Denstern on the streets of London, or saw servants from warring families scolding in the square, but Hamlet came out of his soul and Romeo was born of his passion.

About Honore de Balzac:
Read Balzac properly, and our living friends will turn out to be mere shadows, our acquaintances - shadows of shadows. One of the greatest dramas of my life is the death of Lucien du Rubempre.

Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, not reproduced it.

About Emile Zola:
Zola diligently creates a panorama of the Second Empire. But who cares about the Second Empire now? She's already outdated.

About Charles Dickens:
There is so little common sense in Dickens's art that he is not even capable of satire, his true element is caricature.

About Robert Louis Stevenson:
The romantic environment is the worst environment for a romantic writer. On Gower Street, Stevenson could create new Three Musketeers. And in Samoa he writes letters to The Times about the Germans.
I also see him go out of his way to live a natural life. If you are felling a forest, then in order to do it properly, you should not be able to describe this process. Natural life is essentially unconscious life. By picking up a shovel, Stevenson merely expanded the realm of the artificial.
If I spend the rest of my life in a Parisian cafe reading Baudelaire, it will be more natural than if I take on the job of trimming hedges or planting cocoa knee-deep in mud.

About the American writer Henry James:
He writes prose as if writing a heavy punishment for him.

About Irish writer George Moore:
He wrote in brilliant English until he discovered grammar.

About novelist George Meredith:
As a narrator, he knows everything in the world, with the exception of language, as a novelist he knows absolutely everything, except for the ability to tell a story, and as an artist, he also comprehended everything, except for the gift to speak clearly.

About poet Robert Browning:
After Shakespeare, there was no Shakespearean personality. Shakespeare could sing in millions of voices, Browning could stutter in a thousand ways.

Meredith is Browning in prose, and so is Browning.

About one of his contemporaries:
If he knew less, he might have become a poet.

About the English critic Max Beerbohm:
The gods gave Max the gift of eternal old age.

About Bernard Shaw:
Wonderful person. He has no enemies and is not loved by any of his friends.

You can dislike his plays in different ways, or love his novels.

About writer and publisher Frank Norris:
Frank Norris was invited to every decent English house - once.

About James Whistler:
James Whistler is one of the greatest masters of painting; that is my opinion. And I must add that Mr. Whistler fully shares this opinion.

Whistler, for all his shortcomings, did not sin in a single line of poetry.

About Audrey Beardsley, illustrator of Wilde's Salome:
Audrey Beardsley invented by me.

When a woman marries a second time, it means that she hated her first husband; when a man remarries, it is because he adored his first wife.

Men marry out of boredom, women marry out of curiosity. Both of them are disappointed.

Marriage without love is terrible. But there is something even worse: it is a marriage in which there is love, but only on one side; fidelity, but only on one side ... in such a marriage of two hearts, one is undoubtedly broken.

Loyalty

Loyalty in love is entirely a matter of physiology, it does not depend on our will at all. Young people want to be faithful - and they don't, old people would like to change, but where can they be.

Enemy

Enemies should be chosen with special care.

stupidity

Whenever a person commits stupidity, he does it from the most noble motives.

sins

There is only one sin - stupidity.

By sinning, a person gets rid of the attraction to sin, for fulfillment is the path to purification.

Democracy

Modern democracy has only one dangerous enemy - the good monarch.

Children

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

At first, children love their parents, but over time, however, they begin to judge them and rarely, very rarely forgive.

Children begin with love for their parents. Growing up, they begin to judge them. Sometimes they forgive them.

Good

When Good is powerless, it is Evil.

Virtue

Everyone praises those virtues in which he himself does not need to practice: the rich preach frugality, and idlers eloquently spread about the great significance of work.

Soul

The soul is born old and gradually grows younger. This is the comedic side of life. The body is born young and gradually ages. And this is the tragic side.

Women

If you want to know what a woman really thinks, look at her, but don't listen.

A woman has an amazing instinct: they are ready to discover anything, except for the obvious.

Women inspire us to create masterpieces, but prevent our inspiration from being realized.

Women treat us, men, the same way that humanity treats its gods: they worship us - and get bored, constantly demanding something.

How can a woman be happy with a man who considers her an absolutely rational being?

Every woman is a rebel by nature, and she rebels exclusively against herself.

You should never trust a woman who tells you her age. A woman capable of this is capable of anything.

Ugly women are always jealous of their husbands; beautiful - not before, they are jealous of strangers.

Only a truly good woman can do a truly stupid thing.

Life

Life is too serious a thing to be taken seriously.

The purpose of life is self-expression. To manifest our essence in all its fullness - that's what we live for.

Intuition

A woman has an amazing intuition: she can guess everything except the most obvious.

Sincerity

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, but absolute sincerity is simply fatal.

Art

For the artist, the moral life of a person is just one of the themes of his work. The ethics of art is in the perfect application of imperfect means.

Life is short, art is endless.

The good that art gives us is not in what we learn, but in what we become through it.

Temptation

The only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it.

True

Truth is rarely pure and never unambiguous.

Story

Our only duty to history is to constantly rewrite it.

Books

There are no moral or immoral books. Some books are well or badly written.

Logics

I hate logic, it is always banal and often convincing.

Love

What nonsense is this love. It does not even half have the benefit that Logic has.

Love must forgive all sins, but not the sin against love.

Curiosity

Do you know how great female curiosity is? Almost the same as men's.

Society has a truly insatiable curiosity about everything that does not deserve curiosity.

dreams

Only people of action have more illusions than dreamers. They have no idea why they do something, or what will come of it.

Prayers

Prayer must remain unanswered, otherwise it will cease to be prayer and become correspondence.

Morality

A man who reads morality is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who reads morality is certainly an ugly woman.

Wisdom

In our age, people read too much, it prevents them from being wise.

Men

A man can be happy with any woman - provided that he does not love her.

Thoughts

A thought that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called a thought.

About Me

I don't want to know what they say about me behind my back - I already have a rather high opinion of myself.

I can handle anything but temptation.

Education

Education is an excellent thing, but it is good to remember sometimes that nothing that should be known can be taught.

Optimism

Optimism is based on pure fear.

Those who pretend to be good are taken seriously by the world. Those who pretend to be bad - no. Such is the boundless stupidity of the optimists.

vices

The biggest vice is superficiality.

deeds

With each of our extraordinary actions, we make an enemy for ourselves. To be popular, you have to be mediocre.

Poetry

Bad poetry always springs from sincere feeling.

Is it true

Pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

If a person tells the truth, sooner or later he will be brought to clean water.

Punctuality

Punctuality is the thief of time.

Jealousy

Ugly women are jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women are not up to it - they are busy being jealous of other people's husbands.

Religion

Religion dies the moment it is proven infallible.

Romance

Nothing gets in the way of a romance like a woman's sense of humor or a man's lack of it.

Skepticism

Skepticism is the beginning of faith.

Glory

Popularity is the laurel wreath bestowed by the world on base art. Everything that is popular is bad.

Laughter

Laughter is a good start to a friendship, and laughter is a good way to end it.

Good advice I always pass on to others. There is nothing else to do with them.

Justice

Worse than injustice is only justice without a punishing sword.

Life is never fair. For most of us, it's probably better that way.

Old age

The tragedy of old age is not that you are old, but that you are not young.

Happiness

When we are happy, we are always kind; but when we are kind, we are not always happy.

With freedom, flowers, books and the moon - how can you not be completely happy.

An egoist is someone who loves himself more than me.

Selfishness does not mean living the way you want, it is a requirement for others to live the way you want it.

Ethics

Interest in ethics is evidence of belated mental development.

on other topics

Most of us are not us. Our thoughts are other people's judgments: our life is mimicry; our passions - quote!

To be good means to live in harmony with oneself.

Questions are never indiscreet. Unlike answers.

A good half of modern culture is based on what should not be read.

The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that the saint has a past and the sinner has a future.

If a person judges something sensibly, this is a sure sign that he himself is incompetent in this area.

If anything is worth doing, it is only what is considered impossible.

When you have winning cards in your hand, you should play fair.

The world has always laughed at its tragedies, because only in this way can they be endured. Accordingly, everything that the world has always taken seriously refers to the comedic side of life.

We prefer to think well of others because we are terribly afraid for ourselves.

It is very easy to change others, but it is much more difficult to change yourself.

Only the most impenetrable people do not judge by appearance.

Self-sacrifice must be punishable by law. It demoralizes those for whom they make sacrifices.

Anyone can empathize with the suffering of a friend, but success is only an unusually subtle nature.

Old people believe everything, middle-aged people suspect everyone, young people know everything.

He who looks back on his past does not deserve the future.

Philosophical systems crumble like sand, religions fall one after another like dry autumn leaves; but that which is beautiful is the treasure of eternity and is joy for all time.

To be natural, you must be able to pretend.

On October 16, exactly 162 years ago, the outstanding literary genius Oscar Wilde was born - a playwright, prose writer, poet, and critic known to everyone. Irish by birth, it was he who became one of the most famous writers in England. After all, it is at Oxford Magdalen College that Wilde is born: witty, eloquent, wise, not like everyone else ... And it is there that he gains a reputation as a person who “shines without much effort”. His special philosophy of creativity also took shape here: he does not intrigue with events, he simply introduces us to his characters - contradictory, sometimes self-centered, lonely - unobtrusively offering to touch his worldview and attitude to life.

A great speaker, he made everyone around him fall in love with his stories, sometimes fictional. It was he who made a revolution in the fashion and literature of England in the 19th century: a long-haired handsome man in eccentric outfits, who chose the role of a great aesthete, imitating someone else's voice, not afraid to express himself as he sees fit - only he could afford this. In addition, he skillfully combined all this with extraordinary wisdom, which has not lost its value over the years.

The future genius was born in Dublin in the family of a famous surgeon and poetess. Oscar spent all his childhood with his mother, whom he simply idolized, since soon after his birth his parents broke up. From childhood, the boy grows up in an atmosphere of poetry and beauty - it was from his mother that he inherited impeccable taste and love for beauty. The boy was named after the warrior Fingal and his grandson Oscar (Wilde's full name is Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde), but the mother wanted a girl and did not hide it. The child was told that he was a boy on the day that Oscar's sister was born. Who knows, perhaps this is what influenced the psyche of the future genius ...

Until the age of 9, Oskar studied at home, so when he went to school, he already knew 2 languages: German and French. Later, he enters a prestigious college in Dublin, where he develops a special interest in art, the humanities and ancient literature. Even then, his talent as an excellent orator began to manifest itself - he was the best. After college, he enters Oxford, where he finally gets rid of his Irish accent and leads a circle of decadents.

While still at university, he was known for his passion for decorating a room with beautiful things. Having fallen under the influence of romanticism, he erects a cult of beauty, which later leads to tragedy. The writer was distinguished by an outrageous style of clothing: short pants combined with silk stockings, a vest with embroidery in the form of flowers, bright yellow gloves and a lush frill - this was the norm for him, but not for the public.

After graduating from university, Wilde goes to conquer London. A self-confident writer always with a flower in his buttonhole becomes a regular guest of secular salons. It seemed that all the women of London were crazy about him, and the men were ready to talk with him for hours. He is so sure of his irresistibility that one day at customs he declares: "I have nothing to declare except my genius." He receives recognition not only in London, but also in America and France. Everywhere he is accepted as "the best among equals."

As for the work of Oscar Wilde, it was contradictory and outrageous, like the writer himself. Already the first serious literary works demonstrate the author's commitment to decadence, which is characterized by the cult of individualism, pretentiousness, mysticism, pessimistic moods of loneliness and despair. In lectures, which he actively began to read from 1881, Oscar advocated the denial of the social function of art: Wilde was sure that real art has always been the art of beautiful lies, and the rejection of it can lead art to decline. He wanted to prove that the writer has the right to full self-expression.

In 1890, Oscar Wilde, commissioned by an American publisher, wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the author describes the aestheticization of immorality, the concept of cynical hedonism, and the charm of vice. In the same period, he writes several more plays, which are very successful, but at the same time are accompanied by public scandals. The loudest of them, of course, was associated with the novel "Dorian Gray" - then the writer was accused of immorality. Further, the drama "Salome" was banned by censorship - here everything was already more serious, because Wilde touched on the biblical theme, which he presented in the style of decadence.

At 29, Oscar Wilde marries the beautiful Constance Loyd for love. He was happy. One after another, two sons Cyril and Vivian were born. Oscar loved the kids, but he rarely saw them, as he constantly traveled around with lectures and led a busy social life. Meanwhile, fate is preparing a surprise for both of them.

Years pass, and Oscar Wilde is horrified to realize that he no longer feels anything for his wife. Being a supporter of the position that there is nothing worse than marriage without love, and being disappointed in life, he goes headlong into work. Around the same time, he met Alfred Douglas. Wilde compared him to Narcissus, who gratefully accepted signs of attention. But society did not appreciate such an ambiguous friendship between Oscar and Alfred, and in 1895 a scandal broke out that put an end not only to the writer's literary career, but also made him lose his will and desire to live. Wilde sues the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his closest friend Alfred Douglas, for accusations of homosexuality. However, Douglas is a witness for the prosecution, and Wilde is convicted of immorality and sentenced to two years in prison. Wilde's plays immediately disappear from theater posters, and some works are banned.

Two years later, Wilde leaves prison a completely sick and broken man. Under a false name, he leaves for France and dies three years later in poverty. In recent years, he falls into an ongoing depression and says that the world is full of suffering and that the highest duty of the poet is to write about them. In his last work, The Ballad of Reading Prison, he tells the story of a prisoner sentenced to death for the murder of his beloved.

Oscar Wilde passed away on November 29, 1900, but in our hearts he will forever remain one of the brightest figures in literature. To this day, his works are divided into quotes, we have chosen the brightest ones.

Life according to Oscar Wilde

"In every person there are two beginnings: the desire for God and the desire for Satan."

“Everyone can empathize with the suffering of a friend, but success is only an unusually subtle nature.”

“The tragedy of old age is not that you are old, but that you still consider yourself young.”

"Books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its shame."

"Society has a truly insatiable curiosity about everything that does not deserve curiosity."

"Sometimes what we think is dead doesn't want to die for a long time."

“Education is a wonderful thing, but it should be remembered at least once in a while that nothing that really needs to be learned can be taught.”

“There are only two real tragedies in life: one is when you don’t get what you want, and the second is when you do.”

Love according to Oscar Wilde

"People always destroy what they love the most."

"The strongest foundation for marriage is mutual misunderstanding."

“Marriage without love is a terrible thing. But there is something worse than even marriage without love. This is a marriage in which there is love, but only on one side; there is fidelity, but only on one side; there is devotion, but only on one side. In such a marriage, one of the hearts will certainly be broken.

"You can be happy with any woman if you don't love her."

“Ugly women are always jealous of their husbands; beautiful is not up to it, they are jealous of strangers.

“A person carries love for himself through his whole life.”

“Love begins with the fact that a person deceives himself, and ends with the fact that he deceives another.”

“Friendship between a man and a woman is impossible. Passion, enmity, adoration, love - but not friendship.

People by Oscar Wilde

“It makes no sense to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or stupid."

"People always laugh at their tragedies - that's the only way to endure them."

"In everything that people take seriously, you need to see the comic side of things."

"We can't stand people with the same flaws that we have."

"Lies are the truth of other people."

“A person is very embarrassed when he speaks on his own behalf. Give him a mask and he will tell you the whole truth."

"Only empty people know themselves."

Oscar Wilde about himself

“I always surprise myself. It's the only thing worth living for."

"Even Dickens didn't have such an extensive audience, I'm treated like a crown prince."

"It's either me or that nasty floral wallpaper" (before dying).

“I don’t want to know what people are saying behind my back. It flatters me too much."

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

"I declare nothing but my genius."