 Section 1 of the Oscar Wilde Calendar. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Oscar Wilde Calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason. Most modern calendars ma the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event. Oscar Wilde. The Oscar Wilde Calendar, a quotation from the works of Oscar Wilde for every day in the year with some unrecorded sayings selected by Stuart Mason. Oscar Wilde, poet, dramatist and man of letters, author of Salome, The Soul of Man, The Importance of Being Earnest, Intentions, Dave Profundis, and other beautiful works, was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, on October 16th, 1854. Educated at Portora Royal School, Eneskillin, he obtained a scholarship at Trinity College, Dublin, and there won the Barclay Gold Medal for Greek in 1874. Sometime demmy of Mordellin College in Oxford, he took a first class in Classical Moderations in 1876, and a first class in Literai Humaniores in 1878, gaining in this year the Newdigates Prize for English Verse with his poem Revenna. He died on November 30th 1900 at the Hotel d'Alsace, 13 Rue de Beaux-Arts, Paris. His body was buried on December 3rd in the cemetery of Bagneur. On July 20th 1909 it was transferred to Père Lachaise, where a monument is to be set up to his memory. And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn, for his mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn. January 1. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. 2. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. 3. An ideal husband produced 1895. Truth, passion and power. There are no better things than these in fiction. 4. At the New York Custom House. I have nothing to declare except my genius. 5. There is no mystery so great as misery. 6. Death is a great price to pay for a red rose, yet love is better than life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man? 7. The importance of being earnest. Revived 1902. Why should not grieves be granted for good acting? Are they not given to those who misunderstand Plato and mistranslate Aristotle, and should the artist be passed over? 8. The best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. 9. A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth glancing at. 10. To disagree with three-fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity, one of the deepest consolations in all moments of spiritual doubt. 11. Love is all very well in its way, but friendship is much higher. Indeed, nothing in the world is either nobler or rarer than a devoted friendship. 12. Three addresses always inspire confidence, even in tradesmen. 13. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. 14. L'âme des villiers dans le corps, c'est pour la régionnaire que celui ci vit. Platon, c'est la jeunesse de Socrates. 15. As soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all. 16. The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. 17. American girls are pretty and charming, little oases of pretty unreasonable-ness in a vast desert of practical common sense. 18. With an evening coat and a white tie, anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. 19. Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions. 20. It is monstrous to compare Dr. Talmage to the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. It is like comparing clown to pantaloon. 21. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist, when one isn't a dentist. It produces a false impression. 22. In war the strong makes slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor. 23. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. 24. The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. 25. The opinions of the old on matters of art are of no value whatsoever. 26. We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art. 27. Surely providence can resist temptation by this time. 28. The mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a brick-a-brack shop, all monsters in dust, with everything priced above its proper value. 29. Most people know that in the concoction of a modern novel, crime is a more important ingredient than culture. 30. A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. 31. The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away. End of Section 1. Section 2 of the Oscar Wilde Calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. February. 1. The soul of man under socialism, published 1891. Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others, which, in the present condition of things, presses hardly upon almost everybody. 2. Young men want to be faithful and are not. Old men want to be faithless and cannot. 3. Lady Wilde died, 1896. 4. All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his. 4. There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon. 5. Details are the only things that interest. 6. One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar. 7. To turn truth into a paradox is not difficult, but George Mededith makes all his paradoxes truths. 8. Ruskin in prose and Browning in poetry were the first who drew for us the workings of the artist soul, the first who led us from the painting or statue to the hand that fashioned it, and the brain that gave it life. 9. A really great artist can always transform the limitations of his art into valuable qualities. 10. An engagement should come upon a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself. 11. Production of Salome in Paris, 1896. The appreciation of literature is a question of temperament, not of teaching. 12. The accumulation of wealth creates the petty thief and puts him in a bamboo cage. It creates the big thief and sets him on a throne of white jade. 13. The Ballad of Reddingale, published 1898. Collected works of Oscar Wilde, published 1908. 14. The importance of being earnest, produced 1895. The first act is ingenious, the second beautiful, the third abominably clever. 15. Lots of people act well, but very few people talk well, which shows the talking is much the more difficult thing of the two, and much the finer thing also. 16. Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. 17. The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral. 18. No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. Vulgarity is the conduct of others. 19. The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. 20. Lady Windermere's Fan, produced 1892. The aim of social comedy is to mirror the manners, not to reform the models of its day. 21. Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief. Skepticism is the beginning of faith. 22. Salome, published in Paris and London, 1893. Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority. 23. De Profundis published, 1905. Pain is the lord of this world, nor is there anyone who escapes from its net. 24. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism. 25. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. 26. 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. 27. Ellen Teddy will always be young. She has the art of putting the burden of her years upon her contemporaries in age. 28. Even business should have a picturesque background. 29. To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness. End of Section 2. Section 3 of the Oscar Wilde Calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. March. 1. The Marquis of Queensbury was thrown away on his family. 2. It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone. 3. Pala bonheur. Sietu Pala bonheur. La plaisir. Il fous roula toujours le plus tragique. 4. Puritanism is never so offensive and destructive as when it deals with art matters. 5. Romance with us is a beautiful and mutual misunderstanding. Romance in America is a very different thing. It is an intellectual friendship. 6. One touch of nature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of nature will destroy any work of art. 7. The British cook is a foolish woman who should be turned for her iniquities into a pillar of salt which she never knows how to use. 8. Pleasure is nature's test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy. 9. What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime and the duties exacted from one after one's death land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position and prevents one from keeping it up. 10. The stage is the refuge of the two fascinating. 11. The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. 12. Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they are better. 13. Relations are a tedious pack of people who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die. 14. Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us and are always bothering us to do something for them. 15. It is only the sacred things that are worth touching. 16. When one is in love one always begins by deceiving one's self. One always ends by deceiving others. 17. Blue books are generally dull reading, but blue books on Ireland have always been interesting. They form the record of one of the great tragedies of modern Europe. In them England has written down her indictment against herself and has given to the world the history of her shame. 18. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect. Simply a confession of failure. 19. It is a curious thing about the game of marriage. The wives hold all the honours and invariably lose the odd trick. 20. There are only five women in London worth talking to and two of these can't be admitted into decent society. 21. Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. 22. All the results of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable. 23. To know anything about one's self one must know all about others. 24. Letter on prison reform in Daily Chronicle, 1898. The first and perhaps the most difficult task is to humanise the governors of prisons, to civilise the warders and to christianise the chaplains. 25. It was in vain that the middle ages strove to guard the bedded spirit of progress. When the dawn of the Greek spirit arose, the sepulchre was empty, the grave clothes laid aside, humanity had risen from the dead. 26. If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation. 27. In his very rejection of art, Walt Whitman is an artist. If poetry has passed him by, philosophy will take note of him. 28. It is only style that makes a school. 29. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over models. 30. Judges, like the criminal classes, have their lighter moments. 31. Good novelists are much rarer than good sons. End of Section 3 Section 4 of the Oscar Wilde Calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. April 1. The world has been made by fools so that wise men should live in it. 2. Popularity is the crown of laudal which the world puts on bad art. 3. Agitators are a set of interfering meddling people who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. 4. La question arrivee souvent terriblement longtemps après la réponse. 5. Oscar Wilde arrested 1895. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. 6. Art is the one thing which death cannot harm. 7. Constance Wilde died 1898. Madded life is merely a habit. 8. Even in prison a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. 9. There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about. 10. It has been said of Swinburne that he is a master of language, but with still greater truth it may be said that language is his master. 11. To the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free. 12. The bad popes loved beauty almost as passionately, nay with as much passion as the good popes hated thought. 13. To the wickedness of the papacy humanity owes much. The goodness of the papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity. 14. Those characteristic British faces that once seen are never remembered. 15. All authority is quite degrading. 16. The old should neither be seen nor heard. 17. Ugliness was first introduced into art when the first bust or portrait of a man was shown. 18. Oscar Wilde committed for trial 1895. Bad manners make a journalist. 19. Sir William Wilde died 1876, a woman of no importance produced 1893. 20. There is not a single dramatic critic in London who would deliberately set himself to misrepresent the work of any dramatist unless, of course, he personally disliked the dramatist. 20. Conceit is the privilege of the creative. 21. Journalism is unreadable and literature is unread. 22. Formerly we used to canonize our great men, nowadays we vulgarize them. 23. When art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders everything. 24. Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner. 25. Elementary education insists on the population of places that no one ever wants to go to, and makes one familiar with the lives of people who probably never existed. 26. Oscar Wilde baptised at St. Mark's Dublin, 1855. His trial at the Old Bailey began in 1895. Society often forgives the criminal. It never forgives the dreamer. 27. Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to a man. Now they crush him. 28. The middle classes air their model prejudices over their gross dinner tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters, in order to try to pretend that they are in smart society and are on intimate terms with the people they slander. 29. It is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him. 30. Though one can dine in New York, one could not dwell there. End of Section 4. Section 5 of the Oscar Wilde calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. May. 1. Oscar Wilde's first trial ended in the disagreement of the jury, 1895. The only really humanizing influence in prison is the influence of the prisoners. 2. There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture. 3. Disobedience in the eyes of anyone who has read history is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made. Through disobedience and through rebellion. 4. Love art for its own sake, and then all things that you need will be added to you. 5. The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. 6. To misquote English poetry is a privilege reserved for Mrs Malaprop. Misquoting Shakespeare is a privilege reserved specially for our English actors. 7. Oscar Wilde released on bail, 1895. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. 8. It is only mediocrities and old maids who consider it a grievance to be misunderstood. 9. A cigarette is a perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. 10. Why should the poor be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board and are beginning to know it. 11. A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her. 12. With the coming of the English, art in Ireland came to an end. The artistic sentiment of Ireland is not, however, dead in the hearts of her sons and daughters. 13. Ideal dramatic criticism is unqualified appreciation. 14. Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast. 15. Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. 16. When a man says that he has exhausted life, one knows that life has exhausted him. 17. In married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand. 18. In prose, at any rate, correctness should always be subordinate to artistic effect and musical cadence. 19. Oscar Wilde released from prison, 1897. The narrow confines of the prison cell seem to suit the sonnets scanty plot of ground. 20. La souffrance est possible, est peut-être nécessaire, mais la pauvretà, la misère, voilà ce qui est terrible, cela salit l'âme de l'homme. 21. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. 22. Oscar Wilde's second trial began, 1895, revival of a woman of no importance, 1907. It is absurd that there should be one law for men and another for women. There should be no law for either. 23. We live in an age where unnecessary things are our only necessities. 24. To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies. 25. Oscar Wilde convicted, 1895. Prison regulations may enforce plain living, but cannot prevent high thinking, nor in any way limit or constrain the freedom of a man's soul. 26. I shall be an enigma to the world of pleasure, but a mouthpiece for the world of pain. 27. Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. 28. Letter on some cruelties of prison life in Daily Chronicle, 1897. A child is utterly contaminated by prison life, but the contaminating influence is not that of the prisoners, it is that of the whole prison system. 29. Marriage of Oscar Wilde to Constance Lloyd, 1884. Every man of position is married nowadays. Bachelors are not fashionable any more. 30. There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies. 31. As long as war is looked upon as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. End of Section 5 Section 6 of the Oscar Wilde calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. June 1. In the summer term Oxford teaches the exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any university can teach. 2. The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralising, and that is of course one of the reasons why socialism wants to get rid of the institution. In fact, property is really a nuisance. 3. Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one. 4. A mother who doesn't part with a daughter every season has no real affection. 5. There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike. The first is called the prince. The second is called the pope. The third is called the people. 6. There are two worlds. The one exists and is never talked about. It is called the real world because there is no need to talk about it in order to see it. The other is the world of art. One must talk about that because otherwise it would not exist. 7. On a lazy June evening no more delightful companion can be found than a poet who has the sweetest of voices and absolutely nothing to say. 8. Behind the perfection of a man's style must lie the passion of a man's soul. 9. If our descendants do not read Dickens they will miss a great source of amusement, and if they do we hope they will not model their style upon his. Of this, however, there is but little danger, for no age ever borrows the slang of its predecessor. 10. Our husbands would really forget our existence if we didn't nag at them from time to time, just to remind them that we have a perfect legal right to do so. 11. To convey ideas through the medium of images has always been the aim of those who are artists as well as thinkers in literature. 12. Enthusiasm for beauty is the secret of Hellenism, and desire for creation is the secret of life. 13. In an evil moment the philanthropist made his appearance and brought with him the mischievous idea of government. 14. Weirdiness and war are the results of an artificial society based upon capital. 15. All influence is immoral, immoral from the scientific point of view, because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. 16. Life is too complex a thing to be settled by hard and fast rules. 17. One wants something that will encourage conversation at the end of the season when everyone has practically said whatever they have to say, which in most cases was probably not much. 18. The evolution of man is slow, the injustice of man is great. 19. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion, these are the two things that govern us. 20. The picture of Dorian Gray published 1890. What the public calls an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art. 21. Women have no appreciation of good looks, at least good women have not. 22. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate. 23. The most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendee voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism. 24. To be born or at any rate bred in a handbag, whether it had handles or not seems to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. 25. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer. 26. Oscar Wilde recited his Newtogate Prize poem Revenna at Oxford, 1878. 27. Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another. 28. In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer. 29. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. 30. Poems by Oscar Wilde published 1881. 1. One man's poetry is another man's poison. End of Section 6. Section 7 of the Oscar Wilde Calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. July. 1. Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. 2. The East End is a very important problem. It is the problem of slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves. 3. There is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopedias. 4. In America the President reigns for four years, and journalism governs for ever and ever. 5. Never speak disrespectfully of society. Only people who can't get into it do that. 6. No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists. 7. 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. 8. If the English had had any idea of what a great poet Shelley really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could. 9. Thousands of excellent and really earnest philanthropists would be absolutely thrown upon the rates if we adopted the view that nobody should be allowed to meddle in what does not concern him. 10. The home seems to be the proper sphere for the man. 11. Umbrellas are not allowed in the Vatican since the Pope's walking stick burst into bloom. 12. What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. 13. Only those should sing of death whose song is stronger than death is. 14. Starvation and not sin is the parent of modern crime. 15. So completely has man's personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man's property with far more severity than offences against his person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship. 16. Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious, both are disappointed. 17. If one tells the truth one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out. 18. Whistler, with all his faults, was never guilty of writing a line of poetry. 19. The realization of oneself is the prime aim of life, and to realize oneself through pleasure is finer than to do so through pain. 20. Oscar Wilde's body translated to Pelechaise, 1909. Assertion is at once the duty and the privilege of the artist. 21. The work of art is to dominate the spectator. The spectator is not to dominate art. 22. To be great is to be misunderstood. 23. When I see a monstrous tulip with four wonderful petals in someone else's garden, I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals. But that is no reason why someone else should grow a tulip with only three petals. 24. Realism is only a background. It cannot form an artistic motive for a play that is to be a work of art. 25. There is no such thing as a model or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. 26. There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. 27. It is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. 28. Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. 29. The Lord's temporal say nothing, the Lord's spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. 30. Oscar Wilde's bankruptcy annulled 1906. Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honour. 31. Chuang Zhu, whose name must carefully be pronounced as it is not written, was born in the fourth century before Christ. The publication of his book in English, two thousand years after his death, is obviously premature. End of Section 7. Section 8 of the Oscar Wilde Calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. August 1. Our climate has so degenerated of late that there is no reason at all why a motto perfectly suitable for February should not be equally appropriate when August has set in with its usual severity. 2. Oscar Wilde sailed on his second visit to America, 1883. America takes the ignorant peasant of Europe and teaches him the meaning of the word liberty. 3. Damian was Christ-like when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such service he realised fully what was best in him. But he was not more Christ-like than Wagner when he realised his soul in music, or than Shelley when he realised his soul in song. 4. Peter has no rival in his own sphere, and he has escaped disciples. And this, not because he has not been imitated, but because in art so fine as his there is something that, in its essence, is inimitable. 5. One should not be too severe on English novels. They are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. 6. The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty. 7. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. 8. Those who reject the battle are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it. 9. The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. 10. Life is not a speculation. It is a sacrament. Its ideal is love. Its purification is sacrifice. 11. One must be serious about something if one wants to have any amusement in life. 12. Books of poetry by young writers are usually promissory notes that are never met. 13. Writing to newspapers has a deteriorating influence on style. 14. Free criticism is as unknown as free trade. 15. Where there is no exaggeration there is no love and where there is no love there is no understanding. 16. A grand passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. 17. Girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right. 18. When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it. It will cease to exist. 19. If you pretend to be good the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism. 20. Vera produced at New York, 1883. It is a curious fact that the worst work is always done with the best intentions and that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves very seriously. 21. The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding. 22. Nature is always behind the age. It takes a great artist to be thoroughly modern. 23. It is not always to high aim and lofty ambition that the prize is given. 24. Writers of poetical prose are rarely good poets. 25. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. 26. There are some artistic temperaments that should never come to maturity that should always remain in the region of promise and should dread autumn with its harvesting more than winter with its frosts. 27. Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Bad people stir one's imagination. 28. It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. 29. The only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They are the only things we can pay. 30. The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle. 31. A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime. End of Section 8. Section 9 of the Oscar Wilde calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. September. 1. It is proper that a limitation should be placed on action. It is not proper that limitation should be placed on art. 2. New edition of Oscar Wilde's works, published in 1909. If my work pleases the few, I am gratified. If it does not, it causes me no pain. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy. 3. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. 4. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. 5. It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read. 6. The longer I live, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. 7. Every great movement comes to an end at the birth of its founder. 8. Nothing looks so much like innocence as an indiscretion. 9. A high model tone can hardly be said to conduce very much either to one's own health or one's happiness. 10. Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary charm in them sometimes. 11. It is personalities, not principles, that move the age. 12. To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still. 13. It is pleasanter to have the entree to Balzac's society than to receive cards from all the Duchesses in Mayfair. 14. Experience is of no ethical value. It is merely the name men give to their mistakes. 15. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. 16. There is hardly a single person in the House of Commons worth painting, though many of them would be the better for a little whitewashing. 17. Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives. 18. To approve or to disapprove of anything is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. 19. Beauty, like wisdom, loves the lonely worshipper. 20. The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. 21. The reason we all like to think well of others is that we are afraid for ourselves. 22. Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood. 23. It is always difficult, even for the most modest of us, to remember that other people do not know quite as much as one does oneself. 24. Travelling in a Pullman car is the perfection of luxury, but one has no more privacy than if one sat in an armchair in Piccadilly. 25. The man who possesses a permanent address, and whose name is to be found in the directorie, is necessarily limited and localised. Only the tramp has absolute liberty of living. 26. Are not the rich and the poor brothers? Aye, and the name of the rich brother is Cain. 27. Everybody pays a penalty for peeping through keyholes, and the keyhole and the back stairs are essential parts of the method of the modern biographer. 28. I have taken to photography. What an art it is! I have been photographing cows in the Villa Borghese. Cows like being photographed, and, unlike architecture, they don't move. 29. It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes. 30. Death and vulgarity are the only two facts that one cannot explain away. End of Section 9. Section 10 of the Oscar Wilde Calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. October. 1. The illiterate classes never read anything except newspapers. 2. A man can paint like Velazquez, and yet be as dull as possible. 3. The English public likes tediousness, and likes things to be explained to it in a tedious way. 4. Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. 5. To look wise is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier. 6. A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on. 7. There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise, or too cruel for that. 8. Picturesqueness is the only thing that makes the poverty of others at all bearable. 9. A woman of no importance published 1894. The prizes of the world degrade a man as much as the world's punishments. 10. Oscar Wilde matriculated at Dublin, 1871. Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last. 11. National hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest. 12. I would rather have discovered Mrs. Langtree than have discovered America. 13. Superstitions are the colour element of thought and imagination. They are the opponents of common sense. Common sense is the enemy of romance. 14. It is really very distressing to find a low standard of ethics in a Sunday newspaper. 15. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. 16. Oscar Wilde born 1854. It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. 17. Oscar Wilde matriculated at Oxford, 1874. Oxford has kept the background for romance, and to the true romantic background is everything, or almost everything. 18. It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true. 19. In the country people get up early because they have so much to do, and go to bed early because they have so little to think about. 20. One never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part. 21. Frackles run in Scotch families just as Gout does in English families. 22. One should never put one's worship into words. 23. People who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others have. The only difference is that their moods are rather meaningless. 24. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. 25. Religion consoles some women. Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation. 26. Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all. 27. The one charm of the past is that it is the past. 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. 28. Women are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art. 29. The only writers who have influenced me are Keats, Flaubert, and Walter Pater. 30. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist. That is all. 31. Friendship never forgets. That is the wonderful thing about it. End of Section 10. Section 11 of the Oscar Wilde Calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. November. 1. Good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. 2. On seeing a skull. Death is so gothic. Life is so Greek. 3. All charming people are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction. 4. Success is given to the strong. Failure is thrust upon the weak. 5. There is always something peculiarly impotent about the violence of a literary man. 6. The best way to make children good is to make them happy. 7. It is not the perfect but the imperfect who have need of love. 8. Lady Windermere's Fan published 1893. There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labour. 9. The cross-benches form a refuge for those who have no minds to make up. 10. Salome prohibited by the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg, 1908. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. 11. A man who is much talked about is always very attractive. 12. One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. 13. Oscar Wilde taken from Wandsworth Prison to Reading, 1895. The laughter, the horrible laughter of the world, a thing more tragic than all the tears the world has ever shed. 14. One of the tragedies of prison life is that it turns a man's heart to stone. 15. It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal. 16. Crying is the refuge of plain women, but the ruin of pretty ones. 17. There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. 18. There is always a certain amount of danger in any attempt to cultivate impossible virtues. 19. Revival of Lady Windermere's Fan, 1904. English actors act quite well, but they act best between the lines. 20. It is better to be good looking than to be good. 21. Truly religious people are resigned to everything, even to mediocre poetry. 22. I don't think I shall live to see the new century. If another century began and I was still alive, it would be more than the English could stand. 23. If a woman really repents, she never wishes to return to the society that has made or see in her ruin. 24. Prisoner chaplains are entirely useless. They are, as a class, well-meaning, but foolish indeed silly men. 25. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, nor a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that she has a history. 26. It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties. 27. Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success. 28. Oscar Wilde took his degree at Oxford, 1878. It is always an advantage not to have received a sound commercial education. 29. It appears that I am dying beyond my means. 30. Death of Oscar Wilde, 1900. The importance of being earnest revived, 1909. Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile, like most kings. End of Section 11. Section 12 of the Oscar Wilde Calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. December. 1. Though indignation may make a great poet, bad temper always makes a poor critic. 2. Maddige is the one subject on which all women agree, and all men disagree. 3. Oscar Wilde, 1900. A true artist reveals himself so perfectly in his work, that unless a biographer has anything more valuable to give us than idle anecdotes and unmeaning tales, his labour is misspent and his industry misdirected. 4. In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience. 5. Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art. 6. It's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth, the only people to whose opinions I listen with any respect are people much younger than myself. 7. The senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal. 8. If theology desires to move us, she must rewrite her formulas. 9. Opera of Salome produced at Berlin, 1905. German sounds are thoroughly respectable language. 10. Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, conscience is the trade name of the farm. 11. There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life fully, entirely, completely, or dragging out some false, shallow degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. 12. There are only two areas of any importance in the world's history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art. 13. Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable. 14. To know nothing about their great men is one of the necessary elements of English education. 15. To give form to one's dreams, to give shape to one's fancy, to change one's ideas into images, to express oneself through a material that one makes lovely by mere treatment, to realize in this material the immaterial ideal of beauty, this is the pleasure of the artist. It is the most sensuous and most intellectual pleasure in the whole world. 16. No artist recognizes any standard outside his own temperament. 17. The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life. 18. A man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. 19. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. 20. Originality, like beauty, is a fatal gift. 21. The only apostle who did not deserve proof was Saint Thomas, and Saint Thomas was the only apostle who got it. 22. A government might just as well try to teach painters how to paint, or sculptors how to model, as attempts to interfere with the style, treatment, and subject matter of the literary artist. 23. Ignorance is like a delicate, exotic fruit. Touch it, and the bloom is gone. 24. Oscar Wilde sailed for New York, 1881. Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one's prejudices. 25. Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions. 26. Charity creates a multitude of sins. 27. America's youth is one of her oldest and most hallowed traditions. 28. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square. 29. No publisher should ever express an opinion of the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. 30. How many men there are in modern life who would like to see their past burning to white ashes before them? 31. A bad book is very dear at a shilling. Thanks adieu to Mr George Alexander, Mr Arthur Humphries, and others, without whose permission it would have been difficult to compile this calendar. Many quotations are made from works little known to the general reader. Some are taken from unpublished manuscripts, others are traditional. For many of the latter, the compiler is indebted to the courtesy of Mr Robert Ross. End of Section 12. End of the Oscar Wilde Calendar by Oscar Wilde, edited by Stuart Mason.