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The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.
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
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Preventing
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Art
Progress
Classics
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Public
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Country
Beauty
Degrade
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Free
Authorities
More quotes by Oscar Wilde
Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.
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If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.
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If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
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They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
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In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.
Oscar Wilde
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Oscar Wilde
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
Oscar Wilde
It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.
Oscar Wilde
Men become old, but they never become good.
Oscar Wilde
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.
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Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
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Oh, don't cough, Ernest. When one is dictating one should speak fluently and not cough. Besides, I don't know how to spell a cough.
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It is awfully hard work doing nothing.
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It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
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I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.
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I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.
Oscar Wilde
As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.
Oscar Wilde
What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait)
Oscar Wilde
I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.
Oscar Wilde
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. If it is worth having, it is worth waiting for. If it is worth attaining, it is worth fighting for. If it is worth experiencing, it is worth putting aside time for.
Oscar Wilde