Oscar Wilde

Anyway I am reading Oscar Wilde.
I wish to hell I could have had a drink and a conversation with this man.
The book is as much a collection of amazing observations and a specific outlook on life,as it is a work of fiction.
"My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals."
"My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom of their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure."
"Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor."
"People are fond of giving away what they need most themselves."
"Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear Basil."
"The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highway man in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism."
"To be good is to be in harmony with one's self. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others."
"I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich."
"My dear Dorian, the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life."
"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account."
"We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and thinks too much to be beautiful."
The above comments are courtesy of Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
But of course they reflect the outlook of Oscar Wilde. Regardless of your opinion of his comments, they do provoke a response. They make you react. They make you think. And feel.
He was an outsider and an original thinker. Flamboyant and controversial.
Apparently Kettner's Champagne Bar was one of Wilde's favorite haunts.
I would give anything to have been able to sit on a stool next to him and indulge in conversation.