Oscar Wilde Quotes
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It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
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Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
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One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
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If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.
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I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
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The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy.
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Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.
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To get into the best society nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people.
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The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.
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A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.
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Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable.
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For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
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Don't be discouraged if your children reject your advice. Years later they will offer it to their own offspring.
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We live, I regret to say, in an age of Big Data hype.
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Travel ennobles the spirit and does away with our prejudices.
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Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.
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Sometimes it takes courage to give into temptation.
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What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.
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Nowadays, saying what you really think can be a serious error since one risks being misunderstood.
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When a voice behind me whispered low,'That fellow's got to swing.'
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I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.
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Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
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I see that any materialism in life coarsens the soul, and that the hunger of the body and the appetites of the flesh desecrate always, and often destroy.
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Pleasure without Champagne is purely artificial.