Oscar Wilde Quotes
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And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.
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No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
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Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won't expect it back.
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Hatred is blind, as well as love.
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I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
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Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate.
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My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.
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We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, that fire can purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all.
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Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
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Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.
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Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
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We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
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A burnt child loves the fire.
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Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
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Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
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My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter warders sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. I have had moments when I thought it would be wise to separate. Ah! Moments of weakness and madness! Now I see that would have mutilated my life, ruined my art, broken the musical chords which make a perfect soul. Even covered with mud I shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you. In my solitude you will be with me.
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Life under a good government is rarely dramatic; life under a bad government is always so.
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It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.
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A beggar hates his benefactor as much as he hates himself for begging.
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Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.
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I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
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One should never make one's debut in a scandal. One should reserve that to give interest to one's old age.
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When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.
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The only thing I cannot resist is temptation.