Oscar Wilde Quotes
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I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
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Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.
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The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the consequence of its work but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also.
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Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.
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Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.
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Nature constantly imitates art.
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Pleasure is the test of nature, its approval sign.
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I have met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you're twenty minutes.
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Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
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The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.
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The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them...
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Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
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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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I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.
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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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Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief.
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You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things...I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas
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Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
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There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.
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There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.
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To many, no doubt, he will seem to be somewhat blatant and bumptious, but we prefer to regard him as being simply British.
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The secret of life is in art.
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He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
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Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.