Oscar Wilde Quotes
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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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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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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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Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
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God grant me the serenity to accept that people are ignorant, the courage to uphold the law when I'm hostile, & the wisdom to realize that murder is illegal.
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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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Imagination is imitative-the real innovation lies in criticism.
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And suddenly the moon withdraws her sickle from the lightening skies, and to her sombre cavern flies, wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze.
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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.
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The only thing worse than being misquoted is being sentenced to two years' hard labour for buggery.
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A sentimentalist—is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.
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The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.
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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.
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Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
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You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.
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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.
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Children start out loving their parents, but as they grow older and discover their parents are human, they become judgmental. And sometimes, when they mature, they forgive their parents, especially when they discover they are also human.
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At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.
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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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Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
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The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
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I often take exercise. Why only yesterday I had breakfast in bed.
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The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.
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It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.