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Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

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
Effects
Imitation
Become
Passes
Done
Hand
Insult
Made
Forget
Creates
Sincerest
Things
Upon
Keeps
Wearied
Art
Effect
Incomparable
Nature
Absolutely
Repeating
Hands
Unique
Forgetting
Form

More quotes by Oscar Wilde

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And now, I am dying beyond my means. (Said while sipping champagne on his deathbed.)
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It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
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It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.
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There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
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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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If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.
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To define is to limit.
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Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.
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Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow.
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I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.
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We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in Art.
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He must have a truly romantic nature, for he weeps when there is nothing at all to weep about.
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Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel
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More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn't read.
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If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
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Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. The past, the present and the future are but one moment in the sight of God, in whose sight we should try to live. Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought. The imagination can transcend them.
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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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Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
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I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not.
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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
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