Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Volume 1John W. Luce, 1905 |
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Common terms and phrases
Arthur Clifton artist ASCANIO Beatrice beautiful bitter blood bread cell child Christ coming COUNT BARDI course Court dagger DAILY CHRONICLE dead dear death diarrhoea dreadful DUCHESS Ay DUCHESS GUIDO Duchess of Padua DUKE Duke's eyes face father feel friends give Grace GUIDO DUCHESS Guido Ferranti GUIDO Nay hand headsman heart heaven horrible kill kiss laugh letter lips live look Lord Cardinal LORD JUSTICE LORD MORANZONE Madam MAFFIO Marquis de Sade merely mode MORANZONE Ay murder never night noble one's OSCAR WILDE pain passion Philistine pity pleasure poor pray punished READING PRISON realise revenge Robert Sherard Saint James Salomé SECOND CITIZEN SECOND SOLDIER secret seems silence sorrow soul speak strange suffering sweet tarry tell terrible thee thing THIRD CITIZEN THIRD SOLDIER thought TIPSTAFF to-night Wandsworth Prison warder words wretched
Popular passages
Page 164 - Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature - this is what I am looking for.
Page 143 - I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Page 46 - I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion.
Page 84 - It could not have been otherwise. At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.
Page 149 - ... from the Bankruptcy Court under conditions of terrible mental distress — down to the poor thief who recognising me as we tramped round the yard at Wandsworth, whispered to me in the hoarse prison voice men get from long and compulsory silence : ' I am sorry 148 for you ; it is harder for the likes of you than it is for the likes of us.
Page 45 - Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations 44 were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
Page 102 - ... dead. But to Christ it was not so. With a width and wonder of imagination that fills one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its external mouthpiece. Those of whom I have spoken, who are dumb under oppres sion and 'whose silence is heard only of God,
Page 87 - Christ's place indeed is with the poets. His whole conception of humanity sprang right out of the imagination and can only be realised by it. What God was to the pantheist, man was to him. He was the first to conceive the divided races as a unity. Before his time there had been gods and men...
Page 46 - I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an...
Page 83 - ... There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its secrets for me also. Of course all this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my books. Some of it is in The Happy Prince, some of it in The Young King, notably in the passage where...