Oscar Wilde Quotes
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God, bless me with luxury. Necessities I can do without.
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Jack? . . . No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed. It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations . . . I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain. Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude. The only really safe name is Ernest.
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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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When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
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To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.
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My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly! You didn't know it then-you know it now.
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There can be nothing more frequent than an occasional drink.
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And thus we rust Life's iron chain Degraded and alone: And some men curse, and some men weep, And some men make no moan: But God's eternal Laws are kind And break the heart of stone.
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You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. living, as you all do, on other and by them, you need at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season.
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I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you. But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.
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The key to making up Oscar Wilde quotes is to add '~ Oscar Wilde' at the end.
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The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life.
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So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.
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It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime.
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For Man's grim Justice goes its way,And will not swerve aside:It slays the weak, it slays the strong,It has a deadly stride:With iron heel it slays the strong,The monstrous parricide!
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That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.
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Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
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Woman's first duty in life is to her dressmaker. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.
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Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.
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The best way to appreciate your job is to, is here to stay.
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I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not.
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It is personalities not principles that move the age.
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Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.
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Then there was a man who said, 'I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; by then it was too late'.