Oscar Wilde Quotes
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It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.
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Nothing worth learning can ever be taught
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Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
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An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
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After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.
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It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.
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The security of Society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of Society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.
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A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
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A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
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I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.
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The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.
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Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.
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The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.
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America is not a country, it is a world.
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It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
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God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.
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It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.
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I was disappointed in Niagara - most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.
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one pale woman all alone, The daylight kissing her wan hair, Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare, With lips of flame and heart of stone.
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A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
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Divorces are made in heaven.
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People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies.
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With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.
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I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
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Travel ennobles the spirit and does away with our prejudices.
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Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
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I don't like Switzerland; it has produced nothing but theologians and waiters.
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God and other artists are always a little obscure.
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Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.
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To live in this world is a rare thing; most people just exist.
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