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The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
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Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
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The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
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Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
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Love is a misunderstanding between two fools.
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It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.
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I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
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The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
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Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
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An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship.
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Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
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Hatred is blind, as well as love.
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Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.
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Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
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The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
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When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.
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It is awfully hard work doing nothing.
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When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
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Love is like a war; easy to start but hard to end and you never know where it might take you.
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Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
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The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.
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The ugly can be beautiful. The pretty, never.
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Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
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Yes, there is a terrible moral in 'Dorian Gray' - a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.