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OWOscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Life dates: 1854 AD — 1900 AD

Wilde’s comedy makes elegant remarks collide with concealed identities and social expectations. Read the selected lines as Algernon’s replies in a scene, rather than instructions from the playwright.

▷ Play this voiceSearch these words ↗Place in time ↗lovecouragehappinesslifenatureknowledgetruthfaith

Life and writing

The catalogue identifies Oscar Wilde and gives his lifetime as 1854–1900. The linked English text lists the play’s characters and arranges its action in three acts. Its subtitle describes a trivial comedy for serious people; the selected remarks are part of an exchange between Algernon and Jack in Act I. The electronic text credits David Price, but the checked record does not identify a printed edition or publisher. Catalogue lifetime years supply biographical context only; the archive’s contributor-supplied labels and undated entries remain unchanged.

Algernon’s claim about romance and uncertainty answers Jack’s intention to propose marriage. Later, after Jack explains his invented younger brother, Algernon responds that truth is rarely pure or simple. Both complete selected sentences match the checked English dialogue under punctuation, case and spacing comparison. The scene also exposes the speakers’ evasions and convenient double lives, so a polished line need not be a reliable moral rule. These matches establish local textual counterparts, not every popular saying credited to Wilde or the playwright’s agreement with each character.

Reading this voice

Read Act I from Jack’s proposed marriage through the explanation of his invented brother. Watch Algernon’s replies alongside what both men conceal. The two selected sentences match the checked English dialogue under limited normalization. Their comic speakers and dramatic situation matter; this book connection does not turn the lines into Wilde’s personal advice or authenticate all contributor-supplied attributions.

Subjects to explore

Words to begin with

Quotations and sayings

10c. 1877 AD
The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
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11c. 1877 AD
When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.
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12c. 1877 AD
What a silly thing love is!' said the student as he walked away. 'It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to philosophy and study metaphysics.' So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read.
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22c. 1877 AD
The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.
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