Excerpts from Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde:
I know you are keenly alive to beauty.
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This is an era in my life, a crisis. I wish I could look into the seeds of time and see what is coming.
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There may be much about which we may differ, you and I, more perhaps than we fancy, but in our desire for beauty in all things we are one.
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If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.
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A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse.
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I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction.
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Tired of being on the heights I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensations.
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Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My Gods dwell in temples made with hands, and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete.
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During the last few months I have, after terrible struggles and difficulties, been able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden in the heart of pain. Clergymen, and people who use phrases without wisdom, sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things that one never discerned before.
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"Nothing is more rare in any man," says Emerson, "than an act of his own." It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
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Suffering is a terrible fire; it either purifies or destroys.
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