Oscar Wilde Quotes
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God, bless me with luxury. Necessities I can do without.
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I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world… And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.
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There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.
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I have made an important discovery... that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effect of intoxication.
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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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And down the long and silent street,The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,Crept like a frightened girl.
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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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A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen.
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Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.
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Tread Lightly, she is nearUnder the snow,Speak gently, she can hearThe daisies grow.
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This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade. I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.
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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'.
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Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.
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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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George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.
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Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.
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Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
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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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Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.
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Tell the cook of this restaurant with my compliments that these are the very worst sandwiches in the whole world, and that, when I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it.
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Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.
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The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
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She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
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The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk.