Oscar Wilde

While I was in Ireland, my jungle buddy Michael came to visit me & we spent a day going to the touristy sights in Dublin. The Oscar Wilde monument in Merrion Square was 3^rd or 4^th stop on the Dublin Bus sightseeing tour and we duly took a stroll into the park to have a look at Oscar. There is a statue of the great man reclining on a rock facing what used to be his old home on the corner of the square and 2 pillars opposite him have some of his most famous quotes. As I read them I realised I recognised some, most made me laugh and other give a pause for thought. Here they are below & in photo. Enjoy J.

• "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
  
• "Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple and the simple thing is the right thing."
  
• "Those whom the Gods love grow young."
  
• "No gentleman looks out of the windows."
  
• "...that little tent of blue that prisoners call the sky."
  
• "Punctuality is the thief of time." – I especially like this one J
  
• "Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."
  
• "Most people are other people."
  
• "Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong."
  
• "The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves."
  
• "Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion."
  
• "Who, being loved, is poor?"
  
• "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
  
• "Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others."
  
• "Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes."
  
• "I can resist everything except temptation."
  
• "This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last."
  
• "Pathos leaves the artist unmoved. But beauty, real beauty can fill his eyes with tears."
  
• "You have set yourself to music."
  
• "To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."
  
• "the true tragedy that dogs most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely"
  
• "I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china."
  
• "I have nothing to declare, except my genius."
  
• "I drink to keep body and soul apart."
  
• "I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never any use to oneself."
  
• "For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die."
  
• "A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
  
• "...my duty is a thing I never do, on principle."
  
• "There is no sin except stupidity."
  
• "Being natural is simply a pose."
  
• "It seems to me we all look at Nature too much and live with her too little."
  
• "They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty."
  
• "Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods."
  
• "All art is at once surface & symbol."
  
• "All art is quite useless"
  
• "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
  
• "Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it but moulds it to its purpose."
  
• "Conscience must be merged in instinct before we become fine."
  
• "Thought is not catching"
  
• "Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
  
• "Poets you know are always ahead of science."
  
• "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art."
  
• "the truth is rarely pure and never simple"
  
• "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth."
  
• "A man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person."
  
• "No work of art ever puts forward views"