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The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of 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
Dominate
Spectators
Art
Work
Spectator

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The British cook, for her iniquities, is a foolish woman who should be turned into a pillar of salt which she never knows how to use.
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The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.
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I expect I shall have to die beyond my means.
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The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.
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I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss.
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I find that forgiving one's enemies is a most curious morbid pleasure perhaps I should check it.
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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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The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it.
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God's eternal laws are kind-and break the heart of stone.
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When a love comes to an end, weaklings cry, efficient ones instantly find another love, and the wise already have one in reserve.
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Now and then it is a joy to have one's table red with wine and roses.
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Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.
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Some things are too important to be taken seriously.
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Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
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What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
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Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
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Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.
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All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns.
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[on his deathbed in a Paris hotel room] Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.
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It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde