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Cleverness becomes a public nuisance.

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
Nuisance
Cleverness
Becomes
Public

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You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. living, as you all do, on other and by them, you need at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season.
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A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.
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Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.
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I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
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Bad artists always admire each others work.
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If God wished to punish us, all he would need to do would be to answer our prayers.
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I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.
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Surely Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds, and dearer than fine opals. Pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the marketplace. It may not be purchased of the merchants, for can it be weighed out in the balance for gold.
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The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite with books my life would be livable -- any life.
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The proper school to learn art is not life but art
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A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.
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However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive.
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There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
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The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
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Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious.
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My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!
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In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.
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We live in the age of the overworked and the undereducated.
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Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.
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Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
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