Oscar Wilde Quotes
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The Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.
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I appropriate what is already mine, for once a thing is published it becomes public property.
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Palermo was lovely. The most beautifully situated town in the world - it dreams away its life in the Conca d'Oro, the exquisite valley that lies between two seas. The lemon groves and the orange gardens were entirely perfect.
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And, as for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes.
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In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.
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Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.
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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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I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.
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Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.
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The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
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I am Irish by race but the English have condemned me to talk the language of Shakespeare.
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They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
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In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.
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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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America is one long expectoration.
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Life is too short to be in a hurry.
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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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Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.
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It is art, and art only, that reveals us to ourselves.
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The best art is about individualism, free self-expression and realising a unique, imaginative perspective- A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent.
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The birds did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.
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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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Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.
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Why, what a wonderful piece of luck! Here is a red rose! I have never seen any rose like it in all my life. It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name.