After Shakespeare, has anyone done more to fill the pages of Bartlett's than Oscar Wilde? Winston Churchill? Groucho Marx? I'd say Yogi Berra but we all know that he never said half the things he said….

Supreme master of le bon mot, Oscar Wilde coined more currency than the U.S. Mint, his memorably phrased insights strewn throughout his plays, poems, fiction, essays, and lectures, so many more lost to posterity, pearls casually dropped in conversation. There's the story of his first visit to America in 1882. When the customs officer asked him, "have you anything to declare?," Wilde reputedly replied: "I have nothing to declare except my genius." Whether it's apocryphal has long become irrelevant; the vignette perfectly captures Wilde's art-in-life, much the way a carpenter's gilded frame accentuates a Rembrandt.

Famously, Wilde pondered whether one should pour one's genius into art or life, so naturally, as with so many difficult choices, he elected to do both. He cleverly flipped the question on its head, positing that it is life which imitates art. The meteoric arc of his 46 years reveals a life lived in accordance with this discovery. His biographer, Richard Ellmann, aptly called Wilde "a spendthrift of genius." Wilde's numerous epigrams, whether written or spoken, comprise the most portable form of his largesse.

Wilde ensconced many of his famed witticisms within the conversations of his literary characters. Even if The Picture of Dorian Gray didn't have its brilliant plot device, the dialogue between Dorian and his mentor, Lord Henry Wotton, makes the novel a must-read with each exchange more sparkling than the last. And those gem-like lines uttered by Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere's Fan, Lord Arthur Goring in An Ideal Husband, or Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest contributed to Oscar Wilde's uncontested ownership of the London stage in the 1890s.

While not a genre per se, a list of epigrams is a form with noteworthy precedent; Wilde was quite familiar with William Blake's Proverbs of Hell, a startling example of concentrated aphoristic firepower. Two collections of Wilde's engeniussed declarations appeared in his lifetime: "A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated," first published in the Saturday Review, November 17, 1894, and "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young," published a month later in the sole issue of The Chameleon, a literary magazine edited by Oxford University undergraduate John Francis Bloxam.

Among the Maxims, here are favorites which I'm wont to quote:

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

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

To be really medieval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.

And try adding these to your Phrases and Philosophies:

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

Pleasure is the only thing we should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.

To be premature is to be perfect.

Industry is the root of all ugliness.

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

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

At one point in Lady Windermere's Fan, the character Cecil Graham asks,"what is a cynic?," to which Lord Darlington answers: "A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing."

* * * * *

In crafting his epigrams, Wilde, whether he consciously knew it or not, used rhetorical structures to yield startling epiphanies. He deploys chiasmus, a kind of linguistic mirror-imaging, in his gem: "In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody."

He finds wit and wisdom in the power of threes—twice:

To be really medieval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.

and

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

He's not afraid to wield blunt force in what could be called le bon mot coup de grâce, a debate-ending one-two punch:

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

Pleasure is the only thing we should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.

And perhaps he had the shape of Blake's infernal proverb "Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius" in mind when he wrote: "Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."

Like a Zen master, Oscar Wilde used paradox, seeming contradiction, and a healthy measure of irreverence to illuminate the truth. And as Jorge Luis Borges said of him in regard to the truth  " . . . el hecho comprobable y elemental de que Wilde, casi siempre, tiene razón" [the verifiable and elementary fact that Wilde is almost always right.]"

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde—even his name was a kind of epigram, a melodious mingling of the ancient, so-called pagan (in Irish mythology, Oscar was the son of Oisín whose father was Finn McCool, the mighty hero whose warrior band were the Fianna) and Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, all served with a generous dollop of alliteration.

Let me leave you with one more bon mot from the Dublin-born wit, a line from his 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan later re-worked by Chrissie Hynde as a lyric in the song "Message of Love" by The Pretenders:

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."