4. Il n’y a qu’une sorte d’amour, mais il y en a mille différentes copies.
Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés.
“everyone was repeating his ‘mots’”. Ada Leverson, Letters to the Sphinx
“Every writer of any individuality has, so to speak, his trademark; but
there are times when the output of Mr Wilde’s epigram factory
threatens to become all trademark and no substance. » (William Archer
on An Ideal Husband, Pall Mall Budget 10 January 1895)
“his one-liners had the perfect pitch and promise of a struck tuning-fork,
but they issued from an imagination in which far deeper harmonies
were latent and constantly in search of more resonant forms of
expression.” Seamus Heaney
7. Beauty “Rien n’est vrai que le beau.”
La beauté est parfaite
La beauté peut toute chose
La beauté est la seule chose
au monde qui n’existe pas a demi [sic]
16. “[…] the literary fact of the matter is that the axe which is
keenest, the one which is still most capable of shattering the
surfaces of convention, is […] the hard-edged, unpathetic
prose that Wilde created […] in dramas like The Importance of
Being Earnest. His heady paradoxes, his over-the-topness at
knocking the bottom out of things, the rightness of his
wrongfooting, all that high-wire word-play, all that freedom to
affront and to exult in his uniqueness - that was Wilde’s true
path to solidarity. The lighter his touch, the more devastating
his effect. When he walked on air, he was on solid ground.”
Seamus Heaney