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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.

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
Men
Artist
Abstract
Life
Sense
Treat
Art
Treats
Beautiful
Meant
Form
Create
Live
Beauty
Nothing
Age
Things
Lost
Autobiography

More quotes by Oscar Wilde

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Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.
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Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
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It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
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What a fuss people make about fidelity! exclaimed Lord Henry. Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
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The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid
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Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
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When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.
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But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.
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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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The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.
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In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.
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The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.
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It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
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Nowadays, saying what you really think can be a serious error since one risks being misunderstood.
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If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.
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With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?
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To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
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He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize
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The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.
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He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.
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