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The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

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
Discovered
Duty
Second
Possible
Firsts
First
Life
Artificial

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Art should never be popular.
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The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.
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A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.
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A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen.
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Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.
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It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame.
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Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?
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LORD ILLINGWORTH What do you think she'd do if I kissed her? MRS ALLONBY Either marry you, or strike you across the face with her glove. What would you do if she struck you across the face with her glove? LORD ILLINGWORTH Fall in love with her, probably.
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The weather still continues charming.
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It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.
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When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. and the portrait in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty. p 349
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No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself
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It is he who has broken the bond of marriage - not I. I only break its bondage.
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There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.
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A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
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Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.
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There are few things easier than to live badly and die well.
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I forget what killed it. I think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. That is always a dreadful moment. It fills one with the terror of eternity.
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Life is too short to be in a hurry.
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I am thoroughly sick of pearls. They make one look so plain, so good and so intellectual.
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