Oscar Wilde - I had read his short stories while in school. We had it in our syllabus. While having to mug up what he had to say to this world...well I did'nt quite enjoy it - as I used to read his story in order to get marks in the English test paper...but later when my brain matured a bit...I began to understand what is literature and depth all about afterall! - I am glad we had his story in our English Literature class.
I will cut - paste some of the quotations that I have downloaded from the net - somewhere I will also add my own comments - I hope you don't mind dear reader .....my comments will be in red.
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. (the reason why I have been insincere all ( well most of) my life because I am an obedient Casablanca. He suggested it. I followed it.But since I am a Libran, I thought of balancing between little sincerity and great deal of sincerity - see what happened - this site !
I delight in men over seventy,
they always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.
A Woman of No Importance.
How many men there are in modern
life who would like to see their past burning to white ashes before them!
An Ideal Husband.
A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite,
and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.
Lady Windermere's Fan.
Nowadays all the married men
live like bachelors and all the bachelors live like married men.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I
don't like compliments, and
I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when
he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.
Lady Windermere's Fan
One should never trust a woman
who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one
anything.
A Woman of No Importance
Crying is the refuge of plain
women but the ruin of pretty ones.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Men know life too early. Women
know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.
A Woman of No Importance
Women are meant to be loved,
not to be understood.
The Sphinx Without a Secret
It takes a thoroughly good woman
to do a thoroughly stupid thing. (like
me! such an utterly good woman I am but look at me now !!)
Lady Windermere's Fan
I don't know that women are
always rewarded for being charming. I think they are usually punished for
it! (correct look at the charming heroines....how
they have to compromise with everything and accept old haggards as their ...partners
!)
An Ideal Husband
I don't think there is a woman
in the world who would not be a little flattered if one made love to her.
It is that which makes women so irresistibly adorable.
A Woman of No Importance
My dear young lady, there was
a great deal of truth, I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty
while you said it, which is much more important. (okay
I will try to look pretty when I eventually make public apperances to scr...up
a lot many thingies)
A Woman of No Importance
Women give to men the very gold
of their lives. But they invariably want it back in such very small change.
(hmmm...sad)
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I am sick of women who love
one. Women who hate one are much more interesting. (Okay
I'll start hating... if that is what as intelligent a man as Oscar desires)
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I prefer women with a past.
They're always so damned amusing to talk to. (so..it
means we have been the same since eons...)
Lady Windermere's Fan
People who count their chickens before they
are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that
it is impossible to count them accurately. (and
people are raving about this Management Guru - Arindam Choudhary)
Letter from Paris, dated May 1900
The
more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner
of later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature. (human
nature ...so inhuman I tell you - very animal like !!)
The Decay of Lying
The
public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth
knowing. (oh! they are still the same
even after the completion of one entire century !!)
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Most
men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualification.
( like marriage and parenthood for example - they(people)
have yet not understood themselves - but they are producing babies like Guinea
pigs !!)
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
It
is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against
one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true. (...not
knowing that truth is so very bitter and creates only bitterness in the nations,
world)
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Life is much too important a thing ever to talk
seriously about it.
Vera, of The Nihilists
The
Book of Life begins with a man and woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations.
A Woman of No Importance
Life
is never fair...And perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
An Ideal Husband
You
must not find symbols in everything you see. It makes life impossible. (oh!
you bet it does..look at me now - taking out meaning of everything !!)
Salome
We
are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell. (try
telling this to Kolkatans - and they will call a rally !!)
The Duchess of Padua
The
world is a stage, but the play is badly cast. (what
can now be done about it...train them..just a proposition!)
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense
of humor in the woman - or the want of it in the man.
(yeah! no wonder why I could
not get into any romantic relationship with any man...Man ?! did I say Man...are
there any....)
A Woman of No Importance
One
should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
A Woman of No Importance
To
love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.(yeah!
just like me - in love with myself)
An Ideal Husband
A
kiss may ruin a human life. (yeah! I
have seen many such lives)
A Woman of No Importance
A
man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her. (and
once he loves...he goes wild- becomes like Oscar maybe)
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Young
men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and cannot.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Faithfulness
is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect
- simply a confession of failures. (
and here I am honestly confessing what the world has given me)
The Picture of Dorian Gray
More quotations......
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys
them so much. (hmm...I will try doing
that)
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. (yeah!but
it is considered the Most developed country ..now)
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack
of imagination. (I was suffering from
lack of imagination ...untill Sahaja happened to me )
Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar
and often convincing. ( yeah! I start
off with vulgar words once I decide I have to win the argument)
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.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we
have to alter it every six months. (nowadyas
it is changed every 6 hours)
I always like to know everything about my new friends,
and nothing about my old ones.
I am not young enough to know everything. (yeah!
my nephew and niece know more than me)
I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated
his ability. ( don't talk of God
...when you know nothig of HIM)
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.
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little
useless information. (imagine our plight
...with multimedia...we have so much to absorb!)
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. (and
they also say that birthdays are celebrating the aging process- towards old
haggardness)
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.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it
is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow. (oh
! well I was never the serious kinds - so I always had lots of depth - and
people around thought that I am being kiddish)
The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on.
It is never any use to oneself. (just
like Internet jokes, advice is passed to as many people as possible)
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. (this
no one understood as yet !)
To disagree with three-fourths of the British public
is one of the first requisites of sanity. (
thats why Indian Freedom fighters were called insane as they disagreed 100%
with the British)
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be
wrong.
Why was I born with such contemporaries? (Oh!
well I am happy - where else could I rule the hearts, minds & souls so
B-e-a-Utifully?!)
Three of his stories are attached here. you gotta have Acrobat Reader.
The Importance of being Earnest
Oscar
Wilde
Plays, Prose writings and poems – introduction by Isobel Murray Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.
Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide In thy most need to go by thy side. I treated art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction, I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth & legend around me; I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, & a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. A critic will realize himself in many forms, & by a thousand different ways,& will ever be curious of new sensations & fresh points of view. Through constant change, & through constant change alone, he will find his true unity. I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are taken seriously and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. One would have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Neil without …laughing. Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike. I
will tell you , if you solemly promise to tell everybody else. The fact is , that civilization requires slaves. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. Lady Winderemere’s Fan Lord Windermere : Margaret, I thought Mrs Erlynne was a woman more sinned against than sinning, as the phrase goes. I thought she wanted to be good , to get back into place that she had lost by a momment’s folly, to lead again a decent life. I believed what she told me - I was mistaken in her. She is bad – as bad as a woman can be. Lady Winderemere – Arthue, Arthur, don’t talk so bitterly about any woman. I don’t think now that people can be divided into the good and the bad as though they were two separate races or creations. What are called good women may have terrible things in them , as mad moods of recklessness, assertion, jealousy , sin, Bad women , as they are termed, may have in them sorrow, repentence, pity , sacrifice. And I don’t think Mrs, Erlynne a bad woman = I know she’s not. Wilde
uses wit as a weapon to attack hypocrisy, cant, conventional attitudes
& ideas. |