Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.
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What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
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Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.
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I never put off till tomorrow what I can do the day after.
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Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.
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To be good is to be in harmony with oneself. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.
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Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.
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He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
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Though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something.
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Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.
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Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.
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The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.
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All love is true, but not all truth ... is love?
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Children have a natural antipathy to books - handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous.
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The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.
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The world belongs to the discontented.
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Schools should be the most beautiful place in every town and village-so beautiful that the punishment for undutiful children should be barred from going to school the following day.
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It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.
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Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important.
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When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist.
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The chin a little higher, dear. Style largely depends on the way the chin is worn. They are worn very high, just at present.
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It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
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An entirely new factor has appeared in the social development of the country, and this factor is the Irish-American, and his influence. To mature its powers, to concentrate its action, to learn the secret of its own strength and of England's weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic. At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a strange land it realised what indomitable forces nationality possesses. What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish: America and American influence have educated them.
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I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.