Oscar Wilde Quotes
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It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
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If England treats her criminals the way she has treated me, she doesn't deserve to have any.
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As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.
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I wonder that no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes.
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Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.
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In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.
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It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.
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Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.
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Life, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.
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The American father is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher.
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The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.
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Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art.
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If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.
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I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.
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That quite does for me. I haven't a word to say... Too much care was taken with our education, I am afraid. To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one out from so much.
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If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
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The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed.
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Writing bores me so.
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Music is the art... which most completely realizes the artistic idea and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.
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In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.
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The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.
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To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.
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It is art, and art only, that reveals us to ourselves.
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Freedom, individualism and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.