SEBASTIAN MELMOTH
(OSCAR WILDE)
LONDON
ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS
1911
(Miscellaneous aphorisms, followed by The Soul of Man.)
The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
Women are made to be loved, not to be understood.
It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. Moren than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
Women, as someone says, love with their ears, just as men love with their eyes, if they ever love at all.
It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.
Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.
Misfortunes one can endure, they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's faults—ah! there is the sting of life.
Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.
Questions are never indiscreet; answers sometimes are.
Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes.
Anyone can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live: and unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them.
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
Nowadays people seem to look on life as a speculation. It is not a speculation. It is a sacrament. Its ideal is love. Its purification is sacrifice.
In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbour. In fact, to be a bit better than one's neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues. And what is the result? You all go over like ninepins—one after the other.
All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode.
If you pretend to be good the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
It is most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when they're alone. The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life.
Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Men know life too early; women know life too late-that is the difference between men and women.
He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves and fibres and slowly built-up cells, in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.
