Oscar Wilde Quotes
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The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.
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It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you place the blame.
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If it is not nailed to the floor, it's mine. If I can pry it loose, it is not nailed down.
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In England it is enough for a man to try and produce any serious, beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen.
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Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
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I should have remembered that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals.
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Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.
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I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere.
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There is nothing that art cannot express.
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I don't like principles. I prefer prejudices.
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The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
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Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.
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But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself.
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There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.
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All that we know who lie in gaol - Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long.
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No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
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So lets knock a couple back and make some noise.
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The security of Society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of Society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.
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Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.
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God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.
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The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.
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At six o'clock we cleaned our cells, At seven all was still, But the sough and swing of a mighty wing The prison seemed to fill, For the Lord of Death with icy breath Had entered in to kill.
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The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.
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It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of the world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.