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To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.

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
Greek
Clothes
Modern
Body
Soul
Really

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The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
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I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it.
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The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.
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To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune to lose both looks like carelessness.
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The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
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To be popular one must be a mediocrity. Not with Women, said the duchess, shaking her head and women rule the world. I assure you we can't bear mediocrities. We women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all. It seems to me that we never do anything else, murmered Dorian.
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No gentleman ever has any money.
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Life under a good government is rarely dramatic life under a bad government is always so.
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When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.
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I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.
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The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret.
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Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
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Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.
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Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
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I love the French language... it's a delightful language, especially to curse with. It's like whopping your ass with silk.
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Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices, there are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.
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Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.
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Psycholog­y is in its infancy, as a science. I hope in the interests of Art, it will always remain so.
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The Americans are certainly hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.
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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.
Oscar Wilde