"In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever."
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Oscar Wilde quotes (page 47 of 93)
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"Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace."
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"But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think."
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"I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational."
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"The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away."
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"When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs."
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"It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
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"Reported as Oscar Wilde's last words on his death bed... This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go."
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"Give children beauty, not the record of bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls, as they call history, or of the latitude and longitude of places nobody cares to visit, as they call geography."
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"When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy."
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"Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation."
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"Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out."
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"What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true."
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"I did not think I should be ever loved: do you indeed Love me so much as now you say you do? Ask of the sea-bird if it loves the sea, Ask of the roses if they love the rain, Ask of the little lark, that will not sing Till day break, if it loves to see the day: And yet, these are but empty images, Mere shadows of my love, which is a fire So great that all the waters of the main Can not avail to quench it."
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"Every woman is wrong until she cries."
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"I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first."
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"There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm."
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"Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important."
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"Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital."
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"I am very glad I have travelled. Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one's prejudices."
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