Happy birthday to author, playwright and poet Oscar Wilde, born on this day in 1854.
Wilde meditating on moving from one prison into others, wrote: I wish we could meet and talk over the many prisons of life. Prisons of stone, prisons of passion, prisons of intellect, prisons of morality ... All limitations, external or internal... life is a limitation.
In praise of detachment and light-heartedness, he proposed this remedy: 'to become a spectator of one's own life is to escape its suffering.'
Oscar Wilde’s only novel ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’ fell into my hands, as an impressionable teenager, and made me want to write witty-wise aphorisms, too!
Thank you, Oscar, for your sparkling bon mots — I wouldn’t be the writer that I am, today, without your early influence.
The list of his illustrious literary admirers include:
Jorge Borges, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, André Gide, Max Beerbohm, Stephen Fry, Lawrence Durrell, Camille Paglia, Dorothy Parker, Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hitchens, Morrissey.
Parker, famously, wrote of her idol:
"If, with the literate, I am/ Impelled to try an epigram,/ I never seek to take the credit;/ We all assume that Oscar said it."
Some quotes by the birthday boy, below, to give you an idea of his range, humor and power:
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
Only the shallow know themselves.
Questions are never indiscreet; answers sometimes are.
I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction
When a man acts he is a puppet, when he describes he is a poet.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people
exist, that is all.
Life is too important to be taken seriously.