Oscar Wilde Quotes
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You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
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His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.
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California is an Italy without its art.
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A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.
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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.
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The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.
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They are so pleased to find out other people's secrets. It distracts public attention from their own.
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Surely Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds, and dearer than fine opals. Pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the marketplace. It may not be purchased of the merchants, for can it be weighed out in the balance for gold.
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Prism! Where is that baby?
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Bad manners make a journalist.
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I don't want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that, and I never pay mine.
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The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.
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The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.
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It is absurd to say that the age of miracles is past. It has not yet begun.
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A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.
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Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
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Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.
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There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstand, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous, and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.
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Whenever I'm in doubt, I ask myself, 'What would Jesus do?' And then I realize, Jesus got crucified, so maybe his decision-making isn't all that great.
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Veni vidi veni iterum! I came, I saw, I came again!
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I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her.
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A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.
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My dear young lady, there was a great deal of truth; I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important.
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Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.