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I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.

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
Men
Grief
Sorrow
Capable
Type
Emotion
Suffering
Test
Art
Tests
Great
Supreme

More quotes by Oscar Wilde

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Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.
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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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You can fake intelligence, but you can't fake wit.
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The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone - for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.
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Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
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we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others
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Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
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If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.
Oscar Wilde
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Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy.
Oscar Wilde
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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.
Oscar Wilde
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You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. living, as you all do, on other and by them, you need at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season.
Oscar Wilde
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But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never more return? Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory.
Oscar Wilde
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Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
Oscar Wilde
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I must say... that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.
Oscar Wilde
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I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
Oscar Wilde
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Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
Oscar Wilde
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Really, if the lower orders don't set a good example, what on earth is the use of them?
Oscar Wilde
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To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Oscar Wilde
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The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar.
Oscar Wilde
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Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all you must not strip it of vitality. You must find it in life and re-create it in art.
Oscar Wilde