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If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

Oscar Wilde

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Oscar Wilde
Age: 46 †
Born: 1854
Born: October 16
Died: 1900
Died: November 30
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Oscar O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Takes
Astounding
Funny
Pessimism
Doesn
Sarcastic
Good
Pretend
World
Optimism
Stupidity
Seriously
Goodness

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The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
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To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
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Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.
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Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
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Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
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The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.
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Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them.
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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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She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.
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I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart.
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Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?
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Success is a science if you have the conditions, you get the result.
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Beauty ...is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
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Public Opinion... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.
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Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They’re the only things we can pay.
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In fact, I am never wrong.
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I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips
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