Mirror Mirror

Thought I'd try out my HTML skills and change the look of the blog. I liked it this morning but now it's feeling a little bleurgh to me...

Oscar Wilde was one of my favourite authors at school and I stumbled upon a quotes page on the net, which brought back many memories of my teenage years in boarding school, when I was formulating my own little value system through the literature I was reading. Wilde was a key figure in my canon of literary-philosopher-heroes.

Since the futility of territorial pursuits has been on my mind lately the quote above seemed quite appropriate. It occurred to me that if buying pirated goods were looked upon as shameful or somehow "not the thing to do" then less people would be doing it. That's why it's not as big a problem in say, Australia, as it is here, I suppose - but then I am not really aware of the situation in Oz now, after almost ten years being away.

More gems, from various plays and books by Wilde:

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.

Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.



A finer mind I have rarely come across. He seemed to take the most banal statement and make it shocking (for those times, and sometimes for these times), accurate and wholly true and astute all at once. And in such a way as to make you admire his supreme intellect and humour.

You may groan in advance as I say, I am Wilde about Oscar!

C