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Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

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
Elect
Beauty
Hope
Beautiful
Find
Mean
Things
Cultivated
Meanings

More quotes by Oscar Wilde

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Every American bride is taken there [Niagara Falls], and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.
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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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I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips
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Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
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In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.
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There is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty.
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The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.
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The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
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An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
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I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.
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Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world's tongue.
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The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.
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Music is the art... which most completely realizes the artistic idea and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.
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Civilization is not by means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.
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People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
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Though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something.
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Selfishness is not living your life as you wish to live it. Selfishness is wanting others to live their lives as you wish them to.
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I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
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Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.
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It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.
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