English Oscar-wilde Thoughts

"He had first to free English speech from its weight of serious meaning. He had to win for prose, for measured sentence and paragraph, the license that his contemporaries would concede only to verse: the freedom to delight instantly, in virtue of form alone, and the right to forestall reflection by an explosion of felicity in phrasing. He used the epigram, as a literary form, very much as a ballet-master uses exercises at the bar"

"Not the least of the twentieth-century phenomena that Wilde so uncannily anticipated was the cult of celebrity; and indeed, soon after deciding against a career as a classicist, he was making his first serious effort at courting international fame. During his 1882 tour of America, he was already showing a shrewd understanding of the uses to which that most Greek of literary forms, the epigram, might be put in the age of the telegram and the newspaper"

"He ( Jack London ) wrote an essay called "What Life Means to Me" which takes its place with Kropotkin 's "Appeal to the Young" and Oscar Wilde 's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," and its closing sentence rings with his faith in the rise of the common man. "The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending."

"What has Oscar in common with Art? except that he dines at our tables and picks from our platter the plums for the puddings he peddles in the provinces. Oscar -- the amiable, irresponsible, esurient Oscar -- with no more sense of a picture than of the fit of a coat, has the courage of the opinions -- of others!"

"Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde"

"Wilde's voice was of the brown velvet order — mellifluous — rounded — in a sense giving it a plummy quality — rather on the adenotic side — but practically pure cello — and very pleasing"

"Oscar Wilde did not dive very deeply below the surface of human nature, but found, to a certain extent rightly, that there is more on the surface of life than is seen by the eyes of most people"

"This too I know—and wise it were If each could know the same— That every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim"

"Despite the number of his books and plays, Mr. Wilde was not, I think, what one calls a born writer. His writing seemed always to be rather an overflow of intellectual temperamental energy than an inevitable, absorbing function. That he never concentrated himself on any one form of literature is a proof that the art of writing never really took hold of him"

"Leyendo y releyendo, a lo largo de los años, a Wilde, noto un hecho que sus panegiristas no parecen haber sospechado siquiera: el hecho comprobable y elemental de que Wilde, casi siempre, tiene razón"

"Como Chesterton, como Lang, como Boswell, Wilde es de aquellos venturosos que pueden prescindir de la aprobación de la crítica y aun, a veces, de la aprobación del lector, pues el agrado que nos proporciona su trato es irresistible y constante"

"Oscar Wilde did not dive very deeply below the surface of human nature, but found, to a certain extent rightly, that there is more on the surface of life than is seen by the eyes of most people"