Wilde's quotes

Para quedar bien en los cócteles, recepciones en embajadas y demás tediosas reuniones a las todos estamos habitualmente obligados, paso una lista de citas de Oscar Wilde que saqué hace mucho de una lectura de El Retrato de Dorian Gray.

No, de nada.

(Sensei Mike, ¿cómo era para acortar la parte visible del post?)

• They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
• It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
• But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.
• The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.
• Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
• ...and as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
• Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.
• ...and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.
• Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
• And how delightful other people's emotions were! -- much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him.
• One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends -- those were the fascinating things in life.
• I don't know that I shall tell you that, Mr. Gray. It is so tedious a subject that one would have to talk seriously about it.
• We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
• And beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.
• People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
• We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!
• Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
• "Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women."
  "It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it,"
• "Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered," said Mr. Erskine; "I myself would say that it had merely been detected."
• "They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris," chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes.
  Really! And where do bad Americans go to when they die?" inquired the duchess.
  "They go to America," murmured Lord Henry.
• Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
• Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
• Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
• I used to look at every one who passed me and wonder, with a mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. Some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror. There was an exquisite poison in the air. I had a passion for sensations. . .
• Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect -- simply a confession of failure.
• And now tell me -- reach me the matches, like a good boy -- thanks -- what are your actual relations with Sibyl Vane?
  Dorian Gray leaped to his feet, with flushed cheeks and burning eyes. "Harry! Sibyl Vane is sacred!"
  "It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian, ..."
• When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others.
• But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.
• One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.
• Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin?
• Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
• She did not listen. She was free in her prison of passion.
• Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.
• To be in love is to surpass one's self.
• Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear Basil.
• Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
• The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish.
• The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves.
• As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.
• I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any question -- simple curiosity.
• I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.
• ... no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.
• Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
• It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?
• I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
• When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
• One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
• Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.
• But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce.
• Others find a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good qualities of their husbands. They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins. Religion consoles some. Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a woman once told me, and I can quite understand it. Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
• We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.
• No man comes across two ideal things. Few come across one.
• There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own.
• There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.
• ...loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, ...
• "I didn't say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.
  "Ah, you have discovered that?" murmured Lord Henry.
• Mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things strange to us...
• ... and he felt a curious delight in the thought that art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.
• Society -- civilized society, at least -- is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating.
• Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
• There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.
• Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief.
• When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
• I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
• Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.
• Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality.
• "You are a sceptic.""Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith."
• We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.
• Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion.
• Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.
• "... I like the duchess very much, but I don't love her.”
  "And the duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less, so you are excellently matched."
• It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful."
  "One may lose one's way."
  "All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys."
  "What is that?"
  "Disillusion."
• The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.