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All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

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
Symbols
Surface
Art
Peril
Symbol
Beneath

More quotes by Oscar Wilde

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People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.
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The secret of life is in art.
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The only thing I cannot resist is temptation.
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Most people are other people.
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Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.
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I like looking at geniuses and listening to beautiful people.
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Everyone should keep someone else's diary.
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The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.
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Who, being loved, is poor?
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Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.
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The Americans are identical to the British in all respects except, of course, language.
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We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
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Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
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Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.
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To define is to limit.
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He hasn't an enemy in the world, and none of his friend like him.
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Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things.
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To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune to lose both looks like carelessness.
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Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
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I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.
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