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´It would be unfair to expect other people to be as remarkable as oneself.´ Sharp, hilarious and endlessly insightful, this collection of Oscar Wilde´s wit and wisdom spans topics as diverse as art, technology and human nature.

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´It would be unfair to expect other people to be as remarkable as oneself´

Wilde´s celebrated witticisms on the dangers of sincerity, duplicitous biographers, the stupidity of the English - and his own genius.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics´ huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

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Oscar Fingal O´Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He went to Trinity College, Dublin and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or ´Art for Art´s Sake´) Movement.
Despite winning a first and the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford scholarship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals. After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Savile´s Crime (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his Society Comedies - Lady Windermere´s Fan , A Woman of No Importance , An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest , all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895.
Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas´s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years´ imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol . He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.

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