The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.
Oscar WildeThe Americans are certainly hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.
Oscar WildeBehind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. ... For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.
Oscar Wilde