Oscar Wilde to me is one of the funniest men I have read, his works speak for themselves.

Here are some quotes and a small lecture to enjoy.

Selected quotes

Most people are other people.

Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.  

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

Lecture on art

Everything made by the hand of man is either ugly or beautiful and it might as well be beautiful as ugly. Nothing that is made is too poor or too trivial to be made with an idea of pleasing the aesthetic eye.

Americans as a class are not practical, though you may laugh at my assertion. When I enter a room, I see a carpet of vulgar pattern, a cracked plate on the wall, with a peacock feather stuck behind it. I sit down upon a badly glued machine-made chair that’s creaks upon being touched. I see a gaudy gilt horror, in the shape of a mirror, and a cast iron monstrosity for a chandelier. Everything I see was made to sell. I turn to look for the beauties of nature in vain, for I behold only muddy streets and ugly buildings. Everything looks second class. By second class I mean that which constantly decreases in value. The old gothic cathedral is firmer and stronger and more beautiful now than it was years ago. There is one thing worse than no art and that is bad art.

A good rule to follow in a house is to have nothing therein but what is useful or beautiful, nothing that is not a pleasure to use or was not a pleasure to the one who made it. Allow no machine made ornaments in the house at all. Do not paper your halls but have them wain scoted or provided with a dado. Don’t hang them with pictures, as they are only passage ways.

Have some definite idea of color some dominant keynote of color or exquisite gradation, like the answering calls in a symphony of music. There are symphonies of color as well as sound. I will describe one of Mr. Whistlers’ symphonies in color a symphony in white. A picture representing a grey and white sky, a grey sea, flecked with the white crest of dancing waves, a white balcony with two children in white, leaning over the railings, plucking with white fingers, the white petals of an almond tree in bloom.

The truth of art cannot be taught. They are revealed only to natures which have made themselves receptive of all beautiful impressions by the study and worship of all beautiful things. Do not take your critic as any sure test of art, for artists like the Greek gods are only revealed to one another. The true critic addresses not the artist ever, but the public. His work is with them. Art can have no other aim but her own perfection.

Love art for its own sake and then all these things shall be added to you. The devotion to beauty and to the creation of beautiful things is the test of all great civilizations. It is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament and not a speculation, for beauty is the only thing time cannot harm. Philosophies may fall away like the sand, creeds follow one and other, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity. National hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest, but art is an empire which a nations enemies cannot take from her.

We in our renaissance are seeking to create a sovereignty that shall still be England’s when her yellow leopards are wary of wars and the rose on her shield is crimsoned no more with the blood of battle, and you too absorbing into the heart of a great people this pervading artistic spirit, will create for yourselves such riches as you have never yet created, though your land be a network of railways and your cities the harbors of the galleys of the world

More quotes…………..

On the whole, then, the royal academicians have never appeared under more favorable conditions than in this pleasant gallery. Mr. furniss has shown that the one thing lacking in them is a sense of humour, and that, if they would not take themselves so seriously they might produce work that would be a joy, and not a weariness, to the world. Whether or not they will profit by the lesson, it is difficult to say, for dullness has become the basis of respectability, and seriousness the only refuge of the shallow.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not, old men want to be faithless and cannot.

The English country gentleman galloping after a fox-the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

I can stand brute force. But brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death; one or the other of us has to go.

Art is very difficult in this unlovely town of ours, where as you go to work in the mornings, or return from it at eventide, you have to pass through street after street of the most foolish and stupid architecture that the world has ever seen.

Architecture…reducing three-fourths of the London houses to being merely, like square boxes of the vilest proportions as gaunt as they are grimy, and as poor as they are pretentious

London is full of fogs and ….serious people…whether the fogs produce the serious people or whether the serious people produce the fogs. I don’t know...

Many American ladies on leaving their native land adopt an appearance of chronic ill-health under the impression that it is a form of European refinement.

The British public are really not equal to the mental strain of having more than one topic every three months.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious