Quote

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.

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
Fact
Horrible
Culture
Requires
Facts
Ugly
Become
Slave
Government
Civilization
Work
Unless
Uninteresting
Impossible
Slaves
Almost
Contemplation

More quotes by Oscar Wilde

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LADY STUTFIELD I adore silent men. MRS ALLONBY Oh, Ernest isn't silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don't know. I haven't listened to him for years.
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He wants to enslave you.' 'I shudder at the thought of being free.
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Sphinxes without secrets.
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If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.
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The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
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My dear young lady, there was a great deal of truth I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important.
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The answers are all out there, we just need to ask the right questions.
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Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.
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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
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God and other artists are always a little obscure.
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Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.
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Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
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Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.
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Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented.
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Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.
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Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry.
Oscar Wilde
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Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.
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You told me you had destroyed it. I was wrong. It has destroyed me.
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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 Americans are certainly hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.
Oscar Wilde