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In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

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
Essentials
Matters
Style
Matter
Important
Unimportant
Sincerity
Essential

More quotes by Oscar Wilde

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If it is not nailed to the floor, it's mine. If I can pry it loose, it is not nailed down.
Oscar Wilde
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I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don't degrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
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You told me you had destroyed it. I was wrong. It has destroyed me.
Oscar Wilde
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But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.
Oscar Wilde
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Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failures.
Oscar Wilde
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Loveless marriages are horrible. But there is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage. A marriage in which there is love, but on one side only faith, but on one side only devotion, but on one side only, and in which of the two hearts one is sure to be broken.
Oscar Wilde
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I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.
Oscar Wilde
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Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
Oscar Wilde
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Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.
Oscar Wilde
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But what world says that [I'm wicked]? It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.
Oscar Wilde
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No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.
Oscar Wilde
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The worst thing to do with success, is to boast about it.
Oscar Wilde
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Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
Oscar Wilde
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Be yourself everyone else is taken.
Oscar Wilde
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America is one long expectoration.
Oscar Wilde
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If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.
Oscar Wilde
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Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Oscar Wilde
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He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.
Oscar Wilde
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Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
Oscar Wilde
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Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.
Oscar Wilde