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Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.
Oscar Wilde -
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.
Oscar Wilde
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Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.
Oscar Wilde -
The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.
Oscar Wilde -
If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.
Oscar Wilde -
The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.
Oscar Wilde -
He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.
Oscar Wilde -
To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not - there is no weakness in that.
Oscar Wilde
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To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.
Oscar Wilde -
I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.
Oscar Wilde -
However, I think anything is better than high intellectual pressure. That is the most unbecoming thing there is. It makes the noses of the young girls so particularly large.
Oscar Wilde -
To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.
Oscar Wilde -
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Oscar Wilde -
The only thing worse than being misquoted is being sentenced to two years' hard labour for buggery.
Oscar Wilde
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Sphinxes without secrets.
Oscar Wilde -
A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.
Oscar Wilde -
People who love only once in their lives are. . . shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.
Oscar Wilde -
The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away.
Oscar Wilde -
I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.
Oscar Wilde -
American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.
Oscar Wilde
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History is merely gossip.
Oscar Wilde -
Yes, I am a thorough republican. No other form of government is so favorable to the growth of art. ...because of the importance it places on the individual, their liberty, self-expression, creativity, and personal responsibility.
Oscar Wilde -
If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.
Oscar Wilde -
When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.
Oscar Wilde