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A dirty mind is a joy forever

Posted by Victoria S Dennis on January 18, 2010 at 21:05

In Reply to: A dirty mind is a joy forever posted by RRC on January 17, 2010 at 19:34:

: : : I have heard Oscar Wilde quoted as saying, in part "...but a dirty mind is a joy forever." Is that a Wilde quote, and what iis the rest of it?

: : To me it just sounds quite unlike anything Wilde would have said; and the various Oxford dictionaries of quotations don't know it, which you would expect them to if it dated from Wilde's lifetime. On Googling, I have found it attributed to someone called "Randy Kunkee", of whom I know nothing. (VSD)

: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever" is the first line of John Keats' poem "Endymion" written in 1818.

- and one thing that makes me certain that it wasn't Wilde who parodied it, is that "a dirty mind" neither rhymes with nor fits the scansion of "a thing of beauty". Compare this quotation from Myles na Gopaleen, a.k.a. Flann O'Brien: "That will give you some idea, Keats once said, apropos of the enduring youthfulness of all policemen, that 'a thing of duty is a boy
forever'". (VSD)

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