Oscar Wilde Quotes
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An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
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Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.
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Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever written in my life. Strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?
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We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.
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Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.
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It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.
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I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss.
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In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.
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Misfortunes one can endure - they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults - Ah! there is the sting of life.
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The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.
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How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.
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Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne.
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I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception.
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No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
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I played with an idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air; transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox.
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The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
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An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
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Like strange mechanical grotesques, Making fantastic arabesques, The shadows raced across the blind.
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When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
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The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang-tsǔ spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things.
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Women have become so highly educated... that nothing should surprise us nowadays, except happy marriages.
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I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.
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It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.
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It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country.