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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
Facts
Expression
Art
Progress
Classics
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Public
Checking
Country
Beauty
Degrade
Mean
Free
Authorities
Make
Fact
Preventing
Use
Forms
Means
Authority

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I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
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I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
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We have quite the same ideas. No I think our ideas are quite different. But he has been most pleasant.
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He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize
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Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
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It is a much cleverer thing to talk nonsense than to listen to it.
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The critic has to educate the public the artist has to educate the critic.
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We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon werage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago.
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The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.
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Everyone should keep someone else's diary.
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However, I think anything is better than high intellectual pressure. That is the most unbecoming thing there is. It makes the noses of the young girls so particularly large.
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Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy.
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Sometimes it takes courage to give into temptation.
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It is awfully hard work doing nothing.
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My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip. What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
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There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.
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Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
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The English country-gentleman galloping after a fox — the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
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I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. ... Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.
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