Random Thoughts Friday

Oscar Wilde. "One should either be a work of art, or wear one." I first became aware of Oscar Wilde through a book Charlotte had. It was a collection of his fairy tales. I couldn't have been more than 10 or 11 the first time I read was THE HAPPY PRINCE. I cried at the end. I still cry when I read it. I fell in love with all his fairy tales and that book was one of the ones I pulled from Charlotte's shelves on a regular basis. Sometime in my teens I was mesmerized by THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. But it wasn't until I was adult (20s? 30s?) that I began to learn about the life of this remarkable, brilliant, humorous, and tortured human being.

It has always saddened me that the trauma of being sent to prison silenced him, killed him. He was only 54 when he died, alone and penniless.

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”

“Who, being loved, is poor?”

“Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.”

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”

“A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.”

“Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.”

“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

“It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution”

“If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.”

“Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.”

"I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.”

“The heart was made to be broken.”