Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.
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Everything that is popular is wrong.
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There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
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A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.
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A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.
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No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.
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Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.
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It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
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A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude.
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He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.
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Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
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There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.
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It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.
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I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
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Circumstances should never alter principles!
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Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
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To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
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Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.
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Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
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To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
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The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.
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Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old.
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The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.
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They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.