Emilie’s Reviews > Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde > Status Update

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

Only the shallow know themselves. Time is a waste of money. […] The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over dressed is by being always absolutely over educated.

If one tells the truth one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers.

To be really medieval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes

The 19th century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The 19th century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his face in a glass.

Fortunately, in America, Journalism has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme. As a natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt. People are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments. But it is no longer the real force it was. It is not seriously treated.

To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote King Lear.

Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.

If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.