One of the great writers and wits of ALL time is Oscar Wilde. Patrick Duggan writes in The Conflict Between Aestheticism and Morality in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray:
Oscar Wilde prefaces his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, with a reflection on art, the artist, and the utility of both. After careful scrutiny, he concludes: “All art is quite useless” (Wilde 4). In this one sentence, Wilde encapsulates the complete principles of the Aesthetic Movement popular in Victorian England. That is to say, real art takes no part in molding the social or moral identities of society, nor should it. Art should be beautiful and pleasure its observer, but to imply further-reaching influence would be a mistake. The explosion of aesthetic philosophy in fin-de-siècle English society, as exemplified by Oscar Wilde, was not confined to merely art, however. Rather, the proponents of this philosophy extended it to life itself. Here, aestheticism advocated whatever behavior was likely to maximize the beauty and happiness in one’s life, in the tradition of hedonism. To the aesthete, the ideal life mimics art; it is beautiful, but quite useless beyond its beauty, concerned only with the individual living it. Influences on others, if existent, are trivial at best. Many have read The Picture of Dorian Gray as a novelized sponsor for just this sort of aesthetic lifestyle. However, this story of the rise and fall of Dorian Gray might instead represent an allegory about morality meant to critique, rather than endorse, the obeying of one’s impulses as thoughtlessly and dutifully as aestheticism dictates….http://www.bu.edu/writingprogram/journal/past-issues/issue-1/duggan/
However one views Wilde’s work, he is worth reading.
Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ is Oscar Wilde.
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
Oscar Wilde
True friends stab you in the front.
Oscar Wilde
Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.
Oscar Wilde
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
Oscar Wilde
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.
Oscar Wilde
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
Oscar Wilde
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
Oscar Wilde
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
Women are made to be loved, not understood.
Oscar Wilde
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Oscar Wilde
Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.
Oscar Wilde
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.
Oscar Wilde
There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde
It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But… it is better to be good than to be ugly.
Oscar Wilde
A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
Oscar Wilde
There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
Oscar Wilde
I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
Oscar Wilde
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde
drwilda 
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