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The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us.

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
Things
Bases
Terror
Anxiety
Secret
Moral
Society
Morals
Religion
Govern
Two
Basis

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It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world
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In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.... The Japanese people are ... simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.
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Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic - a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.
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To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.
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There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.
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The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.
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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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Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
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Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
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A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.
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After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.
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Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true.
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Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.
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The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great.
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I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
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The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.
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At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.
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My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.
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I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.
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Cultivated leisure is the aim of man.
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