Oscar Wilde Quotes
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Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.
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The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great.
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I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!
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I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.
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Varnishing is the only artistic process with which Royal Academicians are thoroughly familiar.
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The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.
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I never change, except in my affections.
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Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate.
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In his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded....He stands apart, and the chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by, Philosophy will take note of him.
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All religious organizations exist to sell themselves to the rich.
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There is only good art and mediocre art.
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I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean.
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One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one's hearers.
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When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.
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Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.
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Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.
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As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
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He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.
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Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. Life makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.
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You are young. No hungry generations tread you down.... The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost...
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Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel.
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There is no Mystery so great as Misery.
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Everybody in American seems in a rush to catch a train.
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Lord Illingworth: Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.