Here’s another baker’s dozen:

o Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

o Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

o Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

o I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

o If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

o It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.

o Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

o The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

o The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

o There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

o When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

o Whenever people enthusiastically agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

o The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.

Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford where, a disciple of Pater, he founded an aesthetic cult. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, and his two sons were born in 1885 and 1886. His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and social comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), established his reputation. In 1895, following his libel action against the Marquess of Queesberry, Wilde was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for homosexual conduct, as a result of which he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), and his confessional letter De Profundis (1905). On his release from prison in 1897 he lived in obscurity in Europe, and died in Paris in 1900.