Art & Creativity Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde turns rereading into a litmus test and, in the process, pickpockets the Victorian idea of “improving” oneself through dutiful consumption of respectable books. The line is deliberately absolutist: “no use” is a swaggering dare, not a measured principle. It flatters the reader’s pleasure while skewering the era’s moral bookkeeping, where literature often doubled as sermon, status marker, or proof of proper seriousness. Wilde’s move is to relocate value from edification to delight, from obligation to appetite.

The subtext is more pointed than it first appears. Rereading is not just repetition; it’s a stress test for a book’s texture. A novel or play worth returning to reveals new patterns as the reader changes. Wilde, the consummate dramatist and aphorist, is also defending artifice: the craft that rewards a second look, the sentence that lands differently when you know what’s coming. If a book only “works” once, it’s closer to a newspaper scoop or a parlor trick - useful, maybe even thrilling, but not art in Wilde’s register.

There’s also a quiet act of cultural sabotage here. By declaring rereadable pleasure the only criterion, Wilde cuts against the period’s anxious hierarchy of taste. He gives permission to abandon the worthy slog, and he smuggles in a decadent ethic: read what you love, then love it again, openly, without apology.