OSCAR WILDE, PART 3

Oscar died in poverty in Paris. He had contracted meningitis which was related to an injury to his ear-drum during hard labour in prison.

          It is said that his last words were (in reference to the wallpaper he hated in the room where he stayed): “One of us had to go.”

          From a long letter he wrote while in prison:

        When first I was put into prison, some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

from De Profundis

Here are some of Oscar Wilde's epigrams:

1.Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

2.Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

3.I am not young enough to know everything.

4.The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.

5.The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

6.The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

7.Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong.

8.Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

9.I can resist anything but temptation.

10.Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

11.Only the shallow know themselves.

12.The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

13.All art is useless.

14.Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

15.Dull people are always brilliant at breakfast.

16. Punctuality is the thief of time.