Yannis Stavrou, Still Life - detail, oil on canvas
About humans, society, art...
Oscar Wilde
Aphorisms
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
- A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
- Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
Everything popular is wrong.
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
Hatred is blind, as well as love.
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.
How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.
I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
I am not young enough to know everything.
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
I can resist everything except temptation.
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
- America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
- Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
- Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
- At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.
- Biography lends to death a new terror.
- Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
- Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
- Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
- Genius is born--not paid.
- I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
- I am not young enough to know everything.
- I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.
- I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
- If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
- Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
- It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
- It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal.
- Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
- Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
- Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
- Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
- Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
- One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
- One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
- Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
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