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The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things[64a]: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterisation: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence[64b]. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram[64c].诸神几乎给了我一切。 天赋、名望、地位、才华、气概。我让艺术成为一门哲学，让哲学成为一门艺术；我改变人的心灵、物的颜色[64a]；我所言所行，无不使人惊叹；戏剧，这本是最为客观的艺术形式，在我手里却成为像抒情诗和商籁诗那样抒个人情怀的表达方式，同时范围更为开阔、人物更为丰富；戏剧、小说、韵律诗、散文诗、微妙含蓄或奇妙非凡的对白，我笔之所至，无不以美的新形态展现其美；我让真实本身不但显其真，同样也显其假，亦真亦假，以此作为它天经地义的内涵，显明了无论真假，都不过是心智存在的形式[64b]。我视艺术为最高的现实，而生活不过是一个虚构的形态；我唤醒了这个世纪的想象力，它便在我身边创造神话与传奇；万象之繁，我一言可以蔽之，万物之妙，我一语足以道破[64c]。
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