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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.

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
Terrible
Must
Ready
Great
Quite
World
Hand
Small
Conformity
Hands
Ruined
Except
Stills
Nobody
Still

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An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship.
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The supreme vice is shallowness.
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If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.
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I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.
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Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
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Just be your self. Everybody else is already taken.
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I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.
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We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.
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An opinion is not necesarily correct just because you're willing to die for it.
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Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.
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Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
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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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I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart.
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That is the mission of art - to make us pause and look at a thing a second time.
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The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.
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Music is the perfect type of art.
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Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.
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Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
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A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. ...Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. ...Art is Individualism.
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The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.
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