Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessQuote

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Literature

The story behind the card

Algernon says this in Act 1 of The Importance of Being Earnest, first staged in London on 14 February 1895. His friend Jack has just explained why he is Ernest in town and Jack in the country, calling it ‘the whole truth pure and simple’. Algernon takes that stock phrase, which means ‘and nothing else’, at its word and turns it round: if truth were either, he adds, modern life would be very tedious and modern literature impossible. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish writer famous for his wit.

Türkçe oku
Gerçek nadiren saftır, hiçbir zaman da basit değildir.
Oscar Wilde, Ciddi Olmanın Önemi

Bu sözü Ciddi Olmanın Önemi'nin birinci perdesinde Algernon söyler. Oyun ilk kez 14 Şubat 1895'te Londra'da sahnelendi. Arkadaşı Jack, kentte neden Ernest, taşrada neden Jack olduğunu anlatmış, sonra da “İşte bütün gerçek bu, saf ve basit” demiştir. İngilizcede “pure and simple” (saf ve basit), “ne eksik ne fazla” anlamında gündelik bir kalıptır. Algernon bu kalıbı düz anlamıyla alıp tersine çevirir: Gerçek saf ya da basit olsaydı, modern hayat çok sıkıcı, modern edebiyat da imkânsız olurdu. İrlandalı yazar Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) nükteli sözleriyle ünlüdür.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Oscar Wilde
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

StillnessLiterature

The wound is where the light enters you.

The sentence condenses lines by Coleman Barks, the American poet whose free versions made Rumi a bestseller in English; Barks did not read Persian and reworked scholarly translations. His poem “Childhood Friends” (1990) urges the reader to keep looking at “the bandaged place”, where the light enters. It draws on the Masnavi of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic of Konya, who tells the wounded not to turn away from the plaster a spiritual guide lays on them: the healing comes from its light, not from themselves.

Attributed to Rumi; exact English sentence not matched to a standard textRead card
StillnessLiterature

The rose's lover must endure the thorn.

The Turkish Language Association's dictionary explains that people put up with the troubles that come with someone, or some work, they love. The rose and its thorn are an old pair in Turkish and Persian poetry; in classical Ottoman verse the nightingale longs for the rose, and the thorn often stands for the pain of love. English has “No rose without a thorn”, as does Turkish, “Dikensiz gül olmaz”, but this proverb adds that whoever loves the rose accepts its thorn.

Turkish, Persian variants ProverbRead card
StillnessLiterature

I've fallen in love, or imagine that I have. I went to a party and lost my head. I bought a horse, which I don't need at all.

Leo Tolstoy wrote this in his diary in Moscow on 25 January 1851, when he was 22 and still years away from War and Peace. Eight days earlier, on 17 January, he had set out his money troubles in the same diary: overdue promissory notes, no cash, plans to sell a horse and even to pawn his watch. In the 25 January entry, after the unnecessary purchase, he set himself two rules: do not offer a price for a thing you do not need, and on arriving at a ball, ask someone to dance at once. Tolstoy began keeping a diary at 18 and kept it, with gaps, until his death in 1910, using it to watch himself and to set rules he often broke. Before his wedding in 1862 he gave his diaries to his fiancée, Sophia Behrs, to read.

Leo Tolstoy, from his diariesRead card
StillnessLiterature

In every religion there is love, yet love has no religion.

This sentence has not been found in Rumi's writings, but it echoes a story in his Masnavi, the long Persian poem he dictated in Konya. Moses hears a shepherd offering, in homely words, to mend God's shoes, comb his hair and bring him milk. Moses scolds him, and God rebukes Moses: he was sent to bring people closer, not to drive them away. God's answer includes the line “The religion of love is apart from all religions.” When Rumi died in 1273, Christians and Jews joined his mourners.

Rumi (popular attribution)Read card
StillnessLiterature

Sometimes a man must fight so hard for life that he doesn't have time to live it.

The line is shared widely under Bukowski's name, but no poem, novel or letter containing it has been found. Born in Germany in 1920 and raised in Los Angeles, he spent more than a decade as a filing clerk at the city's post office. In 1969 his publisher, John Martin, offered him financial support to write full time. Bukowski wrote that he could stay and go crazy, or leave and starve: “I have decided to starve.” Within a month he had finished his first novel, Post Office.

Charles Bukowski (attributed)Read card
Next card in the archiveI can resist everything except temptation.Read next →