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

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Hatred is blind, as well as love.
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.
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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.
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The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.
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I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.
Oscar Wilde
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I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.
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Art should never be popular.
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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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Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.
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What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.
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Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
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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The American father is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher.
Oscar Wilde
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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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Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
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If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
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Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.
Oscar Wilde
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Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.
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The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
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The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not its growth and development.
Oscar Wilde