Apologies to Mr Wilde for my poor paraphrasing!

Quotes: stanza 2 - "I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the
best."
stanza 3 -"I can resist everything except temptation."
stanza 4 - "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
stanza 5 - "You can never be overdressed or over-educated."
stanza 6 - "I have nothing to declare except my genius."
stanza 8 - "True friends stab you in the front."
stanza 9 - "...I wept every day at the same hour and for the
same space of time."
"I never saw a man who looked/With such a wistful eye/Upon
that little tent of blue/Which prisoners call the sky."
stanza 10 - On death -"To have no yesterday and no tomorrow. To
forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace." (He considered death as part
of life, simply to be a transition to another realm)
stanza 11 - A man who found great love in life and had such wisdom for
forgiveness and truth: - *"What seems to us as bitter trials are often
blessings in disguise" (apologies for my misquote above).
"Between the optimist and the pessimist,
The difference is droll.
The optimist sees the doughnut;
The pessimist the hole."


Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. He became an iconic 19th century poet and playwright well- known for his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), his plays (e.g. The Importance of Being Earnest) and his poetry. He became widely acclaimed for his wit whilst attending Oxford University and went on to become an advocate of Aestheticism (art for art's sake) which was simultaneously being decried as an unmasculine devotion to art. When he toured the US, expounding on this new movement, although subjected to widespread hostility in the press for his flamboyance, he went on to achieve recognition there for his impassioned beliefs.

Despite being happily married, at the peak of his career in 1891 he began an intimate relationship with the young Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the Marquess of Queensbury who subsequently accused Wilde of sodomy. Despite Wilde's impressive resistance by counter-suing for libel, he was given a custodial sentence and served 2 years at Reading Gaol where his health deteriorated.

On release, Wilde's friends urged him to go to France where homosexuality had been decriminalized as part of the French Revolution. He spent the remaining 3 years of his life roaming Europe under a pseudonym and died, penniless, from acute Meningitis at a hotel in Paris in 1900. In the final moments before his death he was received into the Roman Catholic Church which he had long admired.

Notably, many of his works had concerned the exposure of secret sin and indiscretion with disgraceful consequences.

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."

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