From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.

Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods.

The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.