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To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.

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
Dull
Live
Courage
Believe
Security
Life
Doubt
Belief
Engrossing
Dies
Lulled
Attention
Alert
Intensely
Inspirational

More quotes by Oscar Wilde

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Who is that man over there? I don't know him. What is he doing? Is he a conspirator? Have you searched him? Give him till tomorrow to confess, then hang him! -- hang him!
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There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.
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The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
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Loveless marriages are horrible. But there is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage. A marriage in which there is love, but on one side only faith, but on one side only devotion, but on one side only, and in which of the two hearts one is sure to be broken.
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And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine Burned like the ruby fire set In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine, Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate, Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine.
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We live in the age of the overworked and the undereducated.
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As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.
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One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.
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It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
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The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite with books my life would be livable -- any life.
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Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
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Irony is wasted on the stupid
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The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.
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Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.
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We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with those virtues that are likely to benefit ourselves. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.
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You have never been poor, and never known what ambition is.
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A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of herself. -Author Unknown As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
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You can have your secret as long as I have your heart[.]
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Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.
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Civilization is not by means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.
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