"If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation."
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Quote collection
Oscar Wilde quotes (page 40 of 93)
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"one pale woman all alone, The daylight kissing her wan hair, Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare, With lips of flame and heart of stone."
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"Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism."
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"Like two doomed ships that pass in storm we had crossed each other's way: but we made no sign, we said no word, we had no word to say."
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"I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays."
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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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"Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the dullness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange snakespotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud's building in the College of St. John."
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"In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place."
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"My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter warders sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. I have had moments when I thought it would be wise to separate. Ah! Moments of weakness and madness! Now I see that would have mutilated my life, ruined my art, broken the musical chords which make a perfect soul. Even covered with mud I shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you. In my solitude you will be with me."
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"It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style."
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"The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water."
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"Ah! happy day they whose hearts can break And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his plan And cleanse his soul from Sin? How else but through a broken heart May Lord Christ enter in?"
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"What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless."
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"LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy."
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"The Americans are certainly hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes."
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"Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you."
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"Live the wonderful life that is in you."
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"Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more."
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"Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?"
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"It is awfully hard work doing nothing."
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