Oscar Wilde passed away in Paris in 1900. He spent the last few years of his life penniless and eventually died of neglect. He was a master playwright, poet and intellectual who was well known for his thousands of epigrams. It seems to me he would have been much more successful if he’d been born in the 20th or 21st century. To experience his wit and knowledge on an open forum talk show would have been absolutely amazing. Today I’ll post a few of my all-time favorites of his epigrams. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have over the years.
- No great artist ever sees things as they really are; if he did, he would cease to be an artist.
- Never trust a woman who tells you her real age; a woman who tells you that will tell you anything.
- The proper basis for a marriage is mutual misunderstanding.
- Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious; both are disappointed.
- Education is a wonderful thing, provided you always remember that nothing worth knowing can ever be taught.
- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
- Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
- A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
- The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, and the young know everything.
- To regain my youth, I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or become respectable.
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Here is one of my favorite quotes of his and it is partially responsible for the creation of this blog.
“It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information around.”
everyuselessthing.com 