Free Oscar Wilde by André Gide Page B

like art, means drawing a line someplace.
    Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
    One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
    We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.
    Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
    Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
    The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.
    It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal.
    The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
    Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
    There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
    Wisdom comes with winters.
    One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
    Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
    One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead.
    My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s.
    I can resist anything but temptation.
    Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
    Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
    The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
    Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
    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.
    I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
    At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.
    Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
    One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
    Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.
    There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
    Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.
    We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
    Only the shallow know themselves.
    Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
    T HE PRESENT TRANSLATION INTRODUCES A WORK OF Gide which dates from the first years of the century. The first of the two essays was written in 1901; the second, in 1905. They were published together in 1910 by Mercure de France.
    The essays require no introductory comment. However, the following two quotations from the Journal supplement the text and provide interesting perspectives. The first is dated January 1st, 1892, when Gide was twenty-two years old; the second, June 29th, 1913:
    â€œWilde has done me, I think, nothing but harm. With him, I had forgotten how to think. I had more varied emotions, but I could no longer order them; I was particularly unable to follow the deductions of others. A few thoughts, occasionally; but my clumsiness in handling them made me abandon them. I am now resuming, with difficulty, though with great delight, my history of philosophy, where I am studying the problem of language (which I shall resume with Muller and Renan).”
    â€œCertainly, in my little book on Wilde, I appeared rather unfair toward his work and I pooh-poohed it too casually, I mean before having known