Oscar Wilde Quotes
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If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.
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It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.
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Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
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The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.
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I love the French language... it's a delightful language, especially to curse with. It's like whopping your ass with silk.
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Oh, how I vainly wished to the bearded man in the sky that I was Neapolitan. Why? So I could bring in a fine Neapolitan pest control to help with Queensberry's problem before it gets out of hand.
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The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.
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Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins.
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Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.
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An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
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The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.
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Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand, For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee.
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There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.
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Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success.
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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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When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.
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I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful.
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From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
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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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Everybody in American seems in a rush to catch a train.
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And, by the way, one of the most delightful things I find in America is meeting a people without prejudice — everywhere open to the truth.
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And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand, The hand that held the steel: For only blood can wipe out blood, And only tears can heal.
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If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.
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My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.