"Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas."
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Oscar Wilde quotes (page 74 of 93)
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"A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen."
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"Credit is a young man's capital."
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"One must have some sort of occupation nowadays. If I hadn't my debts I shouldn't have anything to think about."
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"Women have become so highly educated... that nothing should surprise us nowadays, except happy marriages."
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"Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world."
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"Never buy anything simply because it is expensive."
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"As a rule, I think they are quite impossible. Geniuses talk so much, don't they? Such a bad habit! And they are always thinking about themselves, when I want them to be thinking about me."
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"Life under a good government is rarely dramatic; life under a bad government is always so."
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"Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins."
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"It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought."
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"Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance."
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"I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes."
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"I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood."
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"The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water."
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"The only thing in the world worse than being Oscar Wilde is not being Oscar Wilde."
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"I am happy in my prison of passion"
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"The trouble with the lower classes is that they lack the sense of tragedy given to them by the upper classes."
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"The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction."
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"The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life."
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