Oscar Wilde about language

Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet and writer who used different forms troughout the 1880s. In the early 1890s he became one of the most popular writers in London. His parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. Because of them Oscar Wilde became fluent in French and German early in life.

In addition, Oscar Wilde tried a lot of different literary activities: he published poems, lectured in Canada and in the USA and worked as a journalist in London.

Oscar Wilde is famous all over the world and the two most important works of him are “The importance of being earnest” and “The picture of Dorian Gray”.

After a life which was filled with literature he died in Paris (aged 46).

But after all: what does he think about language?

Oscar Wilde about language

#1 I love the French language … it’s a delightful language, especially to curse with.

#2 I am Irish by race, but the English have condemned me to talk the language of Shakespeare.

#3 I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

#4 The Americans are identical to the British in all respects except, of course, language.

#5 Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

#6 You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

#7 Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

#8 Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

#9 There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them.

#10 Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

#11 I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

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